CLOSE TO THE EDGE

I generally agree with PA on rankings of each particular artist's albums. However, for some reason I am always at odds with the community on which albums are the best, for instance, each year. Close to the Edge is definitely the peak of this disagreement: it's beyond my understanding how one can call this album the best thing in prog. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad release, but I would never call it a masterpiece, let alone putting it in the top 10 or even 200.

First of all, it's rather short. I judge albums by amounts of good music in them, not by its concentration (would a perfect 10-min song alone make up a masterpiece album?). This alone has to strip the album of the masterpiece status unless these 37 minutes are really outstanding (the year is 1972, which means the world has seen quite a lot of amazing prog already, it's not that we have to give this one credit for being particularly trailblazing). So, are those 37 minutes so good?

No, no, no. Jon's voice is less annoying than on other albums, but it is as much good as I can say about the vocals. Songwriting is not pleasing either: the almighty epic feels like it's about to fall apart, the album feels minimalistic in a bad way, the music does not flow but rather staggers (smooth transitions, climaxes? how about no). As for the boring acoustic guitar parts - it is beyond me how one can love this. Melodies are not that catchy, the atmosphere not working, so on and so forth.

I would normally balance a review by mentioning strong moments of the album, but here we have gazillion reviews about that and everything has been said not twice and not even quadrice. I'll confine it to a shout out to the Hammond solo in the first track.

3.5 stars, which I of course round down as the rating is ridiculously high anyway. Yes is certainly not my band, but people not liking Yes have their voice as well.

I deem it harmful to prog that this is often offered to newcomers as the best stuff out there. Such statements only set, in those newcomers' eyes, an upper bound on how good prog might be. So, if you, like a lot of passers-by, find Yes annoying, prog is not for you, right? WRONG.