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OCTOBER 13, 1999
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Source: The Daily Vault
http://www.dailyvault.com/1999_10_13-jw.html
THE LADDER
Yes
Damian Records, 1999
By Jason Warburg
Fellow Yes fans, with release of The Ladder, it's officially time to face
it: the '70s are over, and they're not coming back. (And I know what some
of you are going to say, but no, flashbacks don't count.)
For many of us, this is hard to accept. We grew up grooving endlessly on
Steve Howe's electrifying guitar excursions, Chris Squire's thunderingly
original bass lines, Alan White's brawny yet intricate drumming, Rick
Wakeman's otherworldly keyboard textures and Jon Anderson's soaring
stream-of-consciousness vocals. Our dreams these past few years have been
of a return to the epic style of classic '70s albums like Close To The
Edge, brimming with bravura progressive rock musicianship.
After taking a couple of stabs at it, though - including 1996's
tantalizingly strong Keys to Ascension 2, featuring the aforementioned
group of reunited '70s-era Yes-men, the band seems headed in another
direction. Wakeman left (yet again) and was replaced by
guitarist/vocalist/composer Billy Sherwood and keyboard player Igor
Khoroshev. The new line-up's rushed first outing, 1997's Open Your Eyes,
felt more like a retreat to the band's more commercial '80s style than
anything encouraging. With The Ladder, though, Yes seems to be pointing not
back at the '70s, nor (thankfully) the '80s, but forward, toward a new
definition of "The Yes Sound" that aims to encompass everything they've done to date.
One thing this album's opening cut makes clear is that the band can
unquestionably still tackle the sprawling, multi-themed rock numbers that
were once its bread and butter. The nine minute-plus "Homeworld" kicks off
with a spacy, ambient intro that gradually builds a heavy bottom end, Howe
soloing sharply behind Anderson's vocals as the rhythm section pounds
along. Squire and Sherwood provide soaring harmony vocals that fill out the
sound and help obscure some of the range Anderson's lost over the last 30
years (the man IS 55). Then Khoroshev tosses off a couple of flashy organ
and synth solos -- at times sounding more like Close To The Edge-era
Wakeman than Wakeman himself has in a long time -- and you're thinking "They still have it."
Well -- to commit the obvious pun -- yes and no.
This band is still, after 30 years, struggling to define itself. The '70s
editions of Yes valued musical space and virtuoso jams over tight song
structure or other commercial constraints. The '80s band leaned hard in the
other direction, moving from loose ten- and 20-minute bouts of
transcendence to calculated five-minute rock singles. While both
perspectives are apparent on this album, to the band's credit, they seem to
have been able to meld the two approaches much more effectively on this
album than on Open Your Eyes. One of the side effects of the ongoing
low-grade struggle, though, seems to have been the renewed ascendance of
Anderson, long the bridge between the two camps. The first clue to this
comes toward the end of "Homeworld."
Seven and a half minutes in, the band is cooking along when they suddenly
ramp the music down, leaving the close to Anderson, singing alone over
Khoroshev's piano. Having hijacked a song you suspect the band could not
decide how to finish, Anderson proceeds to put on display what's become one
of the band's biggest pitfalls during the last decade. His lyrics, once
full of intriguing imagery and an almost hypnotic reliance on sound over
meaning, have steadily declined until it now sometimes becomes actively
painful to listen to his chirpy, pseudo-New Age blather. "Truth is a simple
place / Here for us all to see / Reach as it comes to you / As it comes to
me." Please, someone buy this man a decent pair of gravity boots.
Next up, "It Will Be a Good Day" is another showcase for Anderson's airy
optimism, relegating the band to the background. Only Howe's minor, but
pretty guitar fills provide any real interest. In fact, the song sounds
like nothing so much as an outtake from Howe's old Top 40 prog-lite band
Asia, the biggest commercial success -- and creative nadir -- of his career.
Batting roughly .500 at this point, Yes moves into the trilogy of
"Lightning Strikes," "Can I?" and "Face to Face." After opening with a
purposefully bizarre ten-second bossa nova sample, "Lightning" bounces
along nicely with Howe hitting strong riffs on acoustic and electric,
Khoroshev contributing more lively organ and synth runs, and Squire and
White running a double-time Cuban-flavored beat under it all. If that all
sounds a little different for Yes, "Lightning" also adds a horn section…
which works surprisingly well on this frothy tune.
"Can I?" is a brief polyrhythmic chant/interlude in which Anderson
too-urgently reaches back for a piece of classic Yes glory by directly
quoting his solo track "We Have Heaven" from 1972's Fragile. "Face to Face"
echoes the tempo of "Lightning" but moves it into more a mainstream rock
setting. With strong performances from everyone, the song ends up doing a
fair job of merging the band's multiple personalities together by giving
Squire and Sherwood the chance to pound a few power chords, while leaving
Howe and Khoroshev room to get their more imaginative licks in. You're left
wanting more when the song finishes prematurely just as Howe is really getting moving.
What follows is maybe the last thing you ever expected from Yes, and what
may be the last straw for some of the "classic" band's more fanatical
adherents. "If Only You Knew" is an unmistakably adult contemporary ballad.
Its gentle beat, synthesized strings, crooning harmony vocals and
unabashedly sentimental lyric would sound perfectly at home with Phil
Collins (that other prog-rock apostate) on lead vocals. Only Howe's soaring
slide-guitar trills and Anderson's voice give you any hint this is Yes.
Maybe the hardest part to accept for a long-time Yes fan? It's actually a
pretty good adult contemporary ballad. Scary thought, that.
The second half of the album plows more familiar territory without
resolving the larger questions about the band's direction. "To Be Alive"
has some interesting Howe tones, but is dominated by one of Anderson's most
embarrassingly rah-rah New Age lyrics ("does it get much better than this?"
-- well, yeah, you really have to hope so). "Nine Voices" is essentially
another Anderson solo piece, a multicultural folk tune whose mandolin
melodies and harmony vocals remind me of "Your Move" from 1971's The Yes Album.
Meanwhile, "Finally" and "The Messenger" both rock hard in the
Sherwood/Squire/'80s-Yes vein that dominated 1997's Open Your Eyes -- for
three or four minutes apiece, anyway, at which point in both cases they
hand the song off to Anderson, Howe and Khoroshev for quieter, more
atmospheric codas. It's as if they took the '70s Yes pattern of stitching
together multiple song ideas into 20-minute symphonies and telescoped it
down into the '80s band's five or six-minute maximum run time.
Then, just when you're thinking the grander vision displayed through the
first three-quarters of "Homeworld" was just a tease, here comes that old
feeling again. "New Language" opens with two minutes of driving, shifting
rhythms under dynamic Howe solos, threatens briefly to falter under
Anderson's la-la lyric, but then follows through with a series of brief but
varied and very energetic instrumental segments. Even bassist Squire, who
for most of the album reverts back to his plodding '80s style, gets into it
with a muscular riff that you're so glad to hear you don't even care that
it sounds just a note or two off his memorable runs on the classic "Roundabout."
Ultimately, The Ladder makes headway but doesn't completely succeed in
resolving the internal musical tensions the band is trying to work through.
It's evident that one camp within the band places adventurous musicianship
first, while another clings to the illusion that they can recapture a
broader, younger audience if they just compromise enough.
Here's the deal I'd propose to Yes as a long-time fan: we'll accept that
the '70s are over, if you'll accept that the '80s are, too. Another chart
success on the scale of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" isn't in the cards, but
there's still plenty of glory and satisfaction to be had playing music that
challenges both the audience and the players. The Ladder has just enough of
it to keep us waiting, wondering and hoping a little longer.
RATING: B-
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