----------------------------------------------------- SEPTEMBER 20, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------- Source: Sydney Morning Herald Yes, Entertainment Centre By John Shand Perhaps the only thing worse than being confronted by one's age is being confronted by one's youth. Then again, if you resent who you used to be when you were young enough to have excuses, what chance do you have of tolerating the current incarnation? Some judicious consciousness alteration used to make the potent bits of Yes monumental, the pretty bits sublime and the spacy bits extraterrestrial. Punk rock was forged pretty much as a response to this music, the irony being that Yes actually rocked harder than their progressive-rock peers, especially after drummer Bill Bruford departed to join the cerebral King Crimson. He was replaced by Alan White, who had played on John Lennon's immortal Imagine and had thumped out a backbeat for the Plastic Ono Band. White tightened, toughened and solidified Yes's fantasies. He was already on board when the band last visited Australia three decades ago; part of the classic line-up which has reformed for this tour, with singer Jon Anderson, guitarist Steve Howe, keyboardist Rick Wakeman and bassist Chris Squire. Thirty years on, and they still opened the performance with a snippet of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite as an introduction to Siberian Khatru, the standing ovation for which set the tone for an ongoing rapturous response. One of their punchiest pieces, it offered a first glimpse of another of their defining aspects: the country influences which have so inflected Howe's glorious guitar playing. His countrified virtuosity and White's oomph earthed a band whose suite-like songs threatened to fizz off into the ether on the hot air of Anderson's indecipherable lyrics. Howe's solo acoustic guitar was as enjoyable as Wakeman's solo flummery was embarrassing, the sumptuous guitar sound begging the question of why the sound of the band as a whole was so compressed and lacking in bottom end. Squire, something of a Spinal Tap refugee -- prancing about with a three-necked (!) instrument at one point -- had a bass sound with bite but little meat, and White's crucial bass drum was a shadow of what it should have been. Anderson's little-boy singing was attractive on an otherwise limp And You And I, while the encores of All Good People and Roundabout kicked up some genuine energy. Overall, two-and-a-half hours whizzed by in a whirl of exultant response, nostalgia and inevitable disappointment at the songs that weren't played. Close Window YesInThePress.com For site comments, problems, corrections, or additions, contact YesinthePress@aol.com