1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 207. Yes – The Yes Album (1971)

And so the onward march of prog-rock continues. My university house-mates were very prog-orientated, but I don’t remember this album. We’re not quite at “Peak Yes” yet, as there’s no Rick Wakeman (keyboards here are by Tony Kaye), and no gatefold cover with a Roger Dean fantasy landscape. Plus the long songs are all under 10 minutes, which by the standard of some of the albums so far is pretty pathetic. I’ve noticed with the artists on this list that some of them have a stunning debut album and then often go nowhere, while others take 2-5 albums to really find their feet, and this is the third Yes album but evidently the one where they began to define their sound 

Despite being subjected to them for three years I never quite caught on to Yes. Jon Anderson’s falsetto voice never really grabbed me, and on the later albums they had, as I recall, a tendency to stop a good tune in the middle, go off and do some proggy noodling for ages, then come back to the tune. Maybe when I get to the Roger Dean albums I’ll see them differently now, we shall see. 

The proggy noodling is less evident here, although there’s still a tendency to jump between movements of a track a bit abruptly – I’ve Seen All Good People, for example, is a simple refrain that starts out like a round of some kind, and then stops, restarts as the same refrain played in a more boogie-woogie style. In this kind of thing Yes, like other prog-rock, borrow from classical music, especially variations. Yours Is No Disgrace does something similar too, but also uses some of the jazz borrowings by again taking a motif and shifting it around.

Having come to this album via the long way through all of that Fifties jazz, I did appreciate it more. There’s some good showcasing of the talents of guitarist Steve Howe as well, who in the track Clap does some amazing Bert Jansch/Django Reinhardt style fast folk-jazz stuff. Kaye is find on keyboards, but it lacks that baroque twiddling of Wakeman, the archetype of the rock keyboardist surrounded by keyboards and dressed in a wizard’s cloak. 

On this album at least, Yes seem to take an approach to lyrics that are as much about sound and scansion as they are about anything. On Yours Is No Disgrace, for example, we have a repeated refrain of  

“Yesterday a morning came, a smile upon your face 
Caesar's palace, morning glory, silly human race,” 

Which is probably the kind of lyric that Prefab Sprout are mocking in King Of Rock And Roll. This is meant as an anti-war song, apparently, but is very indirect about it. There’s nothing wrong with a tone poem – Cocteau Twins basically make it their thing that the lyrics are just sounds, and actually on this album it lends structure to the jazz nature, like Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.  

Not a bad album overall, certainly better than I hoped for, and made me look forward to any other Yes albums (I know at least one of the Roger Dean ones is on here).