Yes: Tormato

Tormato

Best song: On the Silent Wings of Freedom

Worst song: Arriving UFO

Overall grade: 3

It had to end somewhere. The idea of having six outstanding albums in a row is an unfathomable dream for most bands (King Crimson, lookin’ at you) but Yes managed it, made it look effortless even. Yet on their seventh attempt they crashed and burned spectacularly, resulting in a bigger mess than a tomato thrown at a wall with great force. Which, incidentally, isn’t a completely random simile – it’s a true story, as when Rick Wakeman first caught sight of the cover art for this album, he hated it so much that he did indeed throw a tomato at it. That’s a pretty standard response for me when I don’t like something, too.

My two main problems with this album are 1) bad songs, and 2) the band don’t seem like a proper unit here. They’re all playing, a lot of the time, but with very little awareness of what everyone else is playing, which gives a lot of the songs a jumbled and messy feel, as though they’ve been thrown together. It’s a million miles away from the elaborate symphonies they conducted on ‘Close To The Edge’.

I’m pretty tired and I don’t want to waste too many words on this third-rate album, but I’ll throw out a quick description of some of these songs. I’m completely indifferent to ‘Future Times/Rejoice’. The sound quality is absolutely terrible (as it is on most of the album) causing me to spend the first couple of minutes just thinking about that, during which time nothing in the song has managed to grab me. The rest of the song continues to amble by, its watered-down-Yes too bland to provoke a reaction.

‘Madrigal’ and ‘Release Release’ are the two most disappointing things on here – not the worst, just the most disappointing, because they display the band’s sad first few stabs at a commercial hit. ‘Madrigal’ is a kind of ‘Wondrous Stories’ rewrite, but seriously inferior, while ‘Release Release’ rocks much harder, but it’s as though the band were so focused on that aspect that they forgot to make it do anything else.

In actual fact, neither of these ended up being a hit, but they had some vague commercial success with one of the other tracks, ‘Don’t Kill the Whale’. Though Yes doing a protest song is a bit unexpected, it’s actually pretty good, although it’s better if you don’t think too much about the lyrics. A lot of songs here are quite simple and as such, not great showcases for the band’s playing, but the same can’t be said for Wakeman and especially Howe here, where they both get a chance to cut loose and solo a bit.

Second side; ‘Arriving UFO’ is pretty painful, with the group going embarrassingly sci-fi and taking the phrase ‘nerd music’ to a new level. Kind of like ‘The Ancient’ on ‘Tales from Topographic Oceans’, it’s Yes trying to play a more experimental, sound-effect-laden piece, and totally failing – there’s no musical progression in this song or anything to make it more than a medley of themes.

Luckily, things finally start picking up towards the end with the Anderson solo song ‘Circus of Heaven’, which is fun and innocent and seems to reflect his personality really well, and the Squire solo song ‘Onwards’ which is unexpectedly a straight-up love song, and even more unexpectedly, pulled off with ease and grace. It would probably be really pretty if the sound quality didn’t suck so much.

We close with the only song that I can be really positive about; ‘On the Silent Wings of Freedom’. It’s about half the length of ‘Awaken’ on the previous album and also about half as good, but there are worse things than half as good as ‘Awaken’. The whole band are involved and all of their parts work (it feels for the first time like they can hear each other play) and I can tell that if I didn’t know many Yes songs, I’d absolutely love this. As it stands, it feels just a touch formulaic, as if the group have developed a pattern to their epics. Still I enjoy it; it’s jazzy and enigmatic, and Squire’s bass playing is a particular highlight.

To be honest, the odds of a prog band releasing a good album in 1978 were not good, and to their credit they didn’t fail as spectacularly as ELP did with ‘Love Beach’. That said, if an album is so bad that it makes you throw a tomato at it, it should make you think twice about whether you really want it to be released.