TALES FROM TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS

This will be hard. Yes really wanted to create something big now, but it didn't go as good as Yes could go. Some of the parts of the album sound like badly improvised. Like they wanted to do just long pieces and ran out of ideas. They clearly tried to handle more than they could, and having said this, yes, I agree that this is excesive. But not everything is wrong, well, half way. While I think two of the songs of this album are two of the best Yes' songs, I feel that the other two are two of their worst songs (and you know exactly the songs I'm refering to). The Revealing Science Of God is one of the better tracks. It simply has all the spirit of Yes, you know, nice vocals, nice guitars, nice keys, and hey we got Alan White now! Ritual is the other better track. This one resembles a lot of things from the past songs, and once again we got a powerful composition of pure symph prog, and that middle part with the experimental drums just bangs my head. But there is a reason of why this album is not as highly regarded as the others. Well, there are two reasons actually. The Remembering is absolutley dreadful! I'm sorry, but this song just doesn't fit on Yes' excellence. There are a LOT of repeated sections, the atmosphere they intended to create ("a much lighter, folky sound of Yes", as told by Steve Howe) sounds more like a dull and boring side of Yes. The only remarkable thing from this song is that from the lyrics they took the name for their next album (Relayer!). But The Ancient is still worse in my opinion. It is the less creative song in here, and it doesn't flow nice for me. They intended to make this one as a kind of fusion of electronic with symphonic, but my, this one is awful really! If this record only consisted of side A and B, it would have easily been another 5 star album (but not better than CTTE). But man I really can't stand side B and C as I wish I could. But hey, life is hard, everybody makes mistakes. I'm giving this one 2.5 stars rounded to 3 because the band really mended this one with Relayer, that would be a gargantuan improvement, and also my all-time favorite Yes album.

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