CIRCA: 2007

As the previous reviewer of this album, cd, or however we refer to such a production in this day of Information Overload has noted, the lyrics on this album are adequate to not so adequate. . . . The music is very good to excellent. In a sense, this is a concept album; not to the degree of, say, Tales from Topographic Oceans, but with a continuity of theme: a pragmatic idealism regarding human nature, the past, present, and future.

I'd like to take this opportunity to advance a few thoughts on the Rodney Dangerfield of the Yes family: Tony Kaye. For most of us in the U.S., Roundabout and Fragile were our first encounters with Yes. Soon afterwards, we became aware of The Yes Album, Time and a Word, and Yes and the predecessors of Rick Wakeman and of Steve Howe. With our first impressions governed by the virtuosity of Wakeman and Howe, we took a high standard of expectations into our listening of the first three albums. In our youthful zeal, we never gave Kaye or Banks a fair listening. Often, I think of Chris Squire in the Yesyears video of 1991 stating, basically, the departure of Tony Kaye was not the most justified. However, a certain Manifest Destiny has governed the evolution of the band.

Seldom does a musician become as identified with an instrument as Kaye has with the Hammond Organ. Yet, I urge everyone to listen to him on the One Live Badger album in which he almost answers the inequities of his dismissal from Yes. Fortunately, Squire later addressed this wrong in his early 80's invitation to Kaye to become part of Cinema. In our beloved genre of Progressive Rock, Kaye is a rare team player. Interested in evidence of his own virtuosity, please listen to Survival and Harold Land from Yes, or, even, Final Eyes on Big Generator in which his Hammond performance augments the already existing keyboard line of Trevor Rabin. Lastly, I refer again to the '91 Yesyears video. Wakeman and Kaye joke together at the keyboards with Wakeman describing their joint sense of surprise as they discovered what each was actually doing on And You and I and Yours is No Disgrace.

Sherwood, Haun, White, and Kaye have given us a memorable album, extending the legacy of the Yes family and of Progressive Rock in general.