THE YES ALBUM

It's conclusive. Yes are a band that I can never fully warm to or accept completely without prejudice. Prejudice toward singer Jon Anderson or simply annoyed that the rest of the band leave him far too much space for Anderson to exploit. After going through a handful of Yes albums covering their different eras from Fragile, which I find to be a stunning effort, to their eighties sounding but for me failing Big Generator I finally picked up The Yes Album in a hope that it might offer some respite. But again the music to me is standoffish and more or less completely inaccessible, no, that might well be the wrong word but I'm unsure what word would suffice to be honest. I find it hard to get into Yes without be offended by or again simply annoyed by the mundane pseudo intellectual nature of some of the pieces. Were they trying too hard? I cannot say. I was simply a spectator while this was going on and could not see a time when I could interact with the music on The Yes Album. It is never that this is a bad album, nor equally the case a good album but as I listened it stayed stagnant and static as I lacked any emotion, yet I was not having an off day, it simply failed to make any impact or grab me with an urgency. At times there were gaping holes in the songs which I found terribly frustrating, this album has been well written about and all I can say is that if The Yes Album is a prog fans delight then I for one will never be fully accepted as a prog music fan though I do like progressive music, but hopefully not so much as to pigeon hole myself. But hey, I'm completely happy with this so its not all bad.