CLOSE TO THE EDGE

On the right side of the PA homepage, you can see the Top Prog Albums column. Invariable position number one is Yes - Close To The Edge. I.e. it's a patented The Best Prog Album Ever. I'm sorry to completely disagree. No I don't consider my personal taste in music closer to objective truth than the arithmetic mean of 4818 (!) personal ratings. I just always thought that a prog album must be proportionally balanced, especially if it's a concept album. It's not enough to group a number of good tracks into an album, it's also very important how the tracks are organized altogether as a whole, a unit if you like. No doubt that the eponymous symphonic poem is a work of genius in itself. (Yes I call it a symphonic poem, I think it's incorrect to call long tracks of that type 'epic suites'. A genuine suite cannot be a non-stop musical massive, it should be divided by pauses into 3 or better 4 parts based on a specific musical theme each... for example, like Memoirs Of An Officer And A Gentleman. So, the tradition of classifying all long multi-part prog tracks as 'suites' is sensu stricto absurd, but unfortunately I cannot change it...) The second track, And You And I, is a masterpiece as well. But the story ends up with an outspokenly (sorry but) wacky and clumsy rock song. May a good prog concept album end with a silly musical joke? Yes, surely. If its duration is 3 minutes or so. This would be a maximum 'price' for Siberian Khatru I'd say. If there were, for example, a 5-minute track in the vein of Roundabout or South Side Of The Sky plus a 3-minute track in the vein of Long Distance Runaround after And You And I, then it would be more than OK to finish the album with a 3-minute trifle of the Siberian Khatru sort. But in fact, Siberian Khatru was inflated up to 9 minutes. Nine minutes of very loud, monotonous and repetitive vulgar rock. As a result, the structure of the album Close To The Edge is nominally the same as of Relayer, i.e. three heavyweight tracks. But all the three on Relayer are real musical heavyweights, while Close To The Edge is built of two real heavyweights and one lengthy rattle. Yes the title track is among the very best things musicians ever did in 20th and 21st centuries. And yes the second track is charming. But I think the album in toto loses at least to five Yes albums (Going For The One, Relayer, The Yes Album, ABWH and Magnification) due to its disproportionality. I do realize that I'm speaking of the classics and must mind what I'm saying. But on the other hand... who knows? - maybe decades after my generation dies out, next generations of the prog audience will compose a totally different Top Prog Albums column...