THE YES ALBUM

The general feeling in 1971 was "Now that the earth-shaking sixties are officially over, where are we going to take rock music now?" This album provided a lot of answers. Some of us were familiar with Yes from their first two LPs and considered them somewhat of an odd little group that did interesting versions of deep album cuts from American artists and experimental original songs like "Astral Traveller" and we were eager to see what was next. Little did we know that the addition of Steve Howe would elevate the band into prominence the way he did. From the first staccato chords of "Yours is no Disgrace" we realized that something big was happening. It was time for everyone to reassess Yes and move them into the "major player" category.I recently got the Rhino remaster and, like their reconstruction job performed on TFTO, it is incredibly well-done and made me feel like I was hearing it for the first time. This album, despite it's depressingly dreary cover (thank God Roger Dean showed up in time for "Fragile"), spread across college campuses like wildfire in the early 70s and helped to propel "I've seen all good people" onto the heavy-rotation lists of FM radio stations all across the USA. The song gave the band and its genre the exposure that it sorely needed. The album sizzles with incredible energy and invention and was greatly responsible for unlocking more doors leading to the progressive rock explosion that characterized the best musical advances of the seventies. No collection of Yes recordings is complete without this pivotal and well- produced album.