HEAVEN & EARTH

Good Steve Howe starts this off with a nice introduction of notes fading in, just fine so far. Then it gets bubbly. Really bubbly. I mean frothy soap bubble bubbly, as if producer Roy Thomas Baker had scrubbed any and all edge out of the music. The sound is bright and clean, even sumptuous. This is nice music. Too nice. Perhaps the band as a whole has decided to outdo Jon Anderson's la-la-la style of happy songs and create the feel good album of their career. Only it doesn't feel particularly good. It feels like something is missing, which is ironic given that there are virtually no gaps in the music. Every little pause, every potential touch at drama, is filled by the lush production. Background drones, echoes, layers of instrumentation and vocals all smooth the sound out to a bland surface, even if they are all expertly done. Claude Debussy once said that music is the gaps in between the notes. If that is true, then this album qualifies little as music. That the songs are more precious than melodic is also part of the problem. None of them truly stand out. When I finish listening to this the sensation that remains is of a brightly lit cloud softly refracting in numerous shades of yellow, orange, and pink. This would be beautiful in an actual cloud, but not so much in music. Much of the playing is also pedestrian. Whenever some sort of edge comes into play, such as on Step Beyond, it is counteracted by opposing instrumentation. Howe's choppy guitar is smoothed over by the keys of Geoff Downes. In fact, I find his presence the strongest on the whole album. The keys are layered thickly. Howe does a great job on blending in with them, but it is too little to raise this album very high. To paraphrase a professor of mine, sometimes an album soars like an eagle but what we have here is a turkey pretending to be an eagle. Yes may have striven for creating a little bit of musical heaven, note my cloud imagery above, but they have given us an album that is more like a dimming fog than a billowing cloudscape. These kinds of images just keep presenting themselves to me as I listen. A fog can refract different colors of light and I think that looks cool, but again, that is not a good metaphor for music. It is not the quality of musicianship, not really. Jon Davison sounds good to me, I rather like his voice, and the background vocals of Howe and Squire sound good also. The playing is as clean as the production and precise. The problem with this album is not so much the lush production or the simplistic parts, although these augment the true root. No, the problem is the songs themselves. Any song or album requires good musicianship no matter the genre or style. For a band of the status of Yes, good musicianship is a given, and we find it here. But the best musicians need something good to work with, and with a genre such as rock, even prog rock, there needs to be good songs at the foundation, whether instrumental or vocal. The band does not have much to work with and no one is to blame but the band members themselves. After all, they wrote this album. My favorite moment is the final section of the closing number, Subway Walls. Overall, this song contains all the problems of the album in general, but that last section is truly uplifting and even energizing. If only they could have captured that feel more often. Heaven and Earth, an album I was anticipating with unusual excitement, especially after the very good Fly From Here, has proved my greatest disappointment from what is arguably my favorite band ever. Yes are among the elder statesmen of Prog, and one would hope that their profound abilities and august experience would result in an absolute masterwork, especially given the slow rate of releases these days. Great composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all produced their greatest works at the ends of their lives. John Coltrane took his music into higher and higher levels. Steve Hackett has never sounded better than he does now. The latest album from Rush is their best in decades. And Yes? They seem to be trying to appeal to the brony crowd and to attract tweens who do not yet know better when it comes to the music they listen to. It has its merits but it is difficult to recommend this album very highly. I will admit that it does provide a pleasant listen in itself, just not one that deserves the moniker of Yes. There is nothing offensive about it, and mayhaps that is what actually offends. Pleasant I say in the sense that soft pillows and cushy chairs are pleasant; in the sense that a sunrise plieing above a verdant landscape of rolling hills and shaded dells is pleasant. Sign me up for that, but I require a little more edge to my music, a little more inspiration, a few more rough spots, and some of those gaps that Debussy loved so well