With their sophomore album, future progressive rock icons Yes pulled off a somewhat unique and perhaps dubious feat, managing to perform, on the same album, both addition by subtraction and subtraction by addition.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
First, the subtraction by addition.\u00a0 The band \u2013 Jon Anderson (vocals), Chris Squire (bass\/vocals), Bill Bruford (drums), Tony Kaye (keys) and Peter Banks (guitar) \u2013 took the at least somewhat logical leap of augmenting their already cinematic and orchestral approach to music with an actual orchestra.\u00a0 It was an innovation that numerous British contemporaries such as the Beatles, Deep Purple and the Moody Blues were testing out, and in many ways it seemed like it could be a good fit for the band.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Unfortunately, in this particular case, bravado seems to have gotten the better of the young band, as an idea that probably seemed like an exciting natural extension of their sound on paper delivered results that are messy at best, disjointed at worst, and fed dissension within their ranks.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed\u201d — the Richie Havens tune, reimagined as an exercise in orchestral psychedelia \u2013 makes you think for a few minutes that the idea might have legs.\u00a0 Kaye opens the album with a searing Hammond riff which is then topped by assertive strings and horns, a sort of kick-off fanfare; then Squire and Bruford take over with a bounding bass line and skittering, hyperactive percussion.\u00a0 It\u2019s a nice opening \u2013 but then the orchestra disappears completely for two minutes, and when they come back in, they\u2019re playing a Western movie score (said to be from 1958\u2019s The Big Country<\/i>), and the pieces just don\u2019t fit.\u00a0 The track ends up \u2013 much like the album \u2013 as an ambitious, chaotic mess.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen\u201d is one of six songs here composed solely or mostly by Anderson, who dominates this disc with his airy renderings.\u00a0 The middle section has a nice proggy jam where the orchestra seems involved \u2013 however, unlike on later albums, the mid-song jam doesn\u2019t feel seamless with the rest of the song; the vocal sections at the beginning and end feel like disconnected fragments sandwiching the middle section in haphazard fashion.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverydays\u201d achieves the notable feat of transforming a Stephen Stills song into a lounge jazz number.\u00a0 There is a tight, driving jam section toward the middle, but it feels forced up until Banks\u2019 guitar solo, which is quite adventurous and holds up well, at least until the orchestra returns, steps all over his playing, and dissolves the song into a cacophonous muddle.\u00a0 \u201cSweet Dreams\u201d is an upbeat, slightly spacey, somewhat poppy tune with no orchestra; it sounds clean and complete and suggests that the band would have been better off sticking with their core lineup.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Prophet\u201d opens what would have been side two on the album with some atmospheric organ work by Kaye that\u2019s either augmented or interrupted \u2013 it\u2019s hard to tell which \u2013 by strings, then breaking into a vibrant, proggy jam.\u00a0 The basic issue is that almost every time the orchestra appears, it feels spliced in, as if band and producer felt stuck with their own idea and simply tried to find the least awkward place to add strings and\/or horns.\u00a0 The rock part of \u201cThe Prophet\u201d features Squire playing strong lead bass and Anderson offering a sing-songy reading of the verses and then some rather Beatlesque slowed-down middle sections, but every time the strings come in they feel like intruders, and the horns are simply doubling what\u2019s already a simple organ line.<\/p>\n
\u201cClear Days\u201d is one of Anderson\u2019s airiest and most lightweight ballads, which is saying something.\u00a0 You get the feeling he\u2019s trying to be Paul McCartney, grafting a breezy folk tune onto the back of \u201cLady Madonna,\u201d but it just doesn\u2019t work and it\u2019s honestly surprising this one ever saw the light of day. \u201cAstral Traveler\u201d feels like a pre-write of \u201cStarship Trooper,\u201d with a terrific bass line and assertive if unsophisticated guitar and organ (though the distorted vocals are annoying).\u00a0 Closer \u201cTime And A Word\u201d was for decades the only song the band would play from their first two albums — a characteristically sincere plea for understanding that has a nice melody, if little impact.<\/p>\n
The dynamic moments encased within larger songs (see especially \u201cThen\u201d and \u201cThe Prophet\u201d) ultimately can\u2019t make up for this album\u2019s lack of focus and the band\u2019s failure to figure out how to incorporate an orchestra into these songs.\u00a0 Banks in particular feels disengaged from the rest of the group, sounding more like a session player brought in for texture than a full member.<\/p>\n
The latter development points directly to the instance of addition by subtraction aspect of Time And A Word<\/i>.\u00a0 After the album was completed, the group parted ways with Banks, who was never in favor of the orchestral experiment and fought with producer Tony Colton through much of the recording sessions.\u00a0 By the time Atlantic was readying the American edition of the album, Banks had been replaced by Steve Howe (pictured on said U.S. edition), who would go on to become regarded as the definitive guitarist for the group.\u00a0 It was the first of many lineup shifts that have marked the restless reign of a band that has never been comfortable standing still.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":26567,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5713],"rating":[11204],"class_list":["post-41980","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-yes","rating-rating-c-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41980"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}