HEAVEN & EARTH

A truly bad album, made worse by the fact that this is Yes, who in my opinion are, by 1.6 kilometers, the best prog rock band of all time. And I don't buy the argument that this isn't really Yes. In addition to Alan White, who'd been in the band for forty years, you have Steve Howe and Chris Squire! It's true that vocalist Jon Davison cannot fill the shoes of Jon Anderson, but who can? He's a good enough singer. That's not the problem.

This is, give or take, about my hundredth review on Prog Archives, and it'll be my first song-by-song review. It's not something I expected to do, but Heaven and Earth is an unusual album. Each song sounds like a Yes or Yes-related song.

For example, the album opener "Believe Again" sounds like a Tormato cast-off dusted off and re-recorded by 2014 Yes. The fact that Jon Anderson is absent is kind of amazing; not only does it sound almost like his singing, the diction of the lyrics is pure Anderson. And is it just me, or is guitarist Steve Howe playing the main motif from "Top Gun Anthem" throughout the song?

"The Game" and "Step Beyond" are inane numbers that could've come from an Anderson solo album. Nice guitar solo at the end of "The Game," by the way, but after "Believe Again," these songs seem to be confirmation that quality control was seriously lacking this time around. And "To Ascend," I'm sad to say, is a distillation of the worst elements of the first three songs. Davison's phrasing on this one is somehow even more of an Anderson imitation (listen to his delivery of "with the eyes of a child, come to understand" at 3:18).

It doesn't sound anything like Asia, but with a different arrangement, "In a World of Our Own" might've been an Asia song; at a minimum, I was sure Howe had written this one, probably with keyboardist (and Asia leader) Geoff Downes. Nope. Honestly I think "In a World of Our Own" would be a contender for Worst Asia Song.

"Light of the Ages" starts off sounding like another "To Ascend," but finally, at 2:18, a Yes groove, maybe from Keys to Ascension 2 (that's the good KTA) kicks in. But less than a minute later, Davison is back with more spot-on Anderson mimicry. I don't think it's Davison's fault; he's just doing his job. The song then devolves further into something that might've come from the cotton-candy underbelly of Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. More nice guitar work from Howe, but not nice enough to save this one. Speaking of Howe, "It Was All We Knew" is a Howe song from top to bottom, and could've been on one of his 1990s solo albums, although I'm glad it wasn't. Amazingly, and sadly, it's actually one of the best songs on Heaven and Earth.

And then there's "Subway Walls." The first minute and a half is pretty good, and for a little while I thought this was going to be the sole redeeming track here. The jaunty guitar part connecting the intro to the verse-one lead-in bothers me a little, but it's really no worse than "Bumpy Ride." But by the time Davison's singing about "graffiti on subway walls," the song has already deteriorated into Andersonesque social commentary along the lines of "That That Is" (from the first Keys to Ascension - - the bad KTA) or "Lightning Strikes" (from The Ladder). Later there's some keyboard improv over a non-4/4 beat, and a recapitulation of the cool intro, and yet another nice guitar solo, but in all, it sounds like a band trying hard to sound like Yes (again, like the first Keys to Ascension album).

My initial impression of Heaven and Earth was "man, this is a bad album!" Unfortunately, further listens over the past five years haven't changed that much. The issue, I believe, is substandard material, but it goes beyond this. Certain past members of Yes have never been on a bad Yes album; Bill Bruford and Trevor Horn come to mind. I get the sense that they exerted some sort of quality control, but it could just be coincidence, and it doesn't explain why Relayer would be Yes's best. Anyway, it seems like the band should've realized the quality of the material they were writing and rehearsing for Heaven and Earth; indeed Steve Howe seems to have realized it later. Maybe they did realize it after the studio time was booked and the cover was painted, and they just hoped that it wasn't as bad as it seemed.

Anyway, Heaven and Earth is truly for completists only. I'd say that a serious Yes fan should be able to sleep soundly without this in his or her collection. If you want to expand your Yes collection beyond Fragile or 90125, I'd say you couldn't do too much worse that Heaven and Earth.