No Jon Anderson, Chris Squire or Alan White? No
problem for Yes. Prog’s great survivors hit a late-career upswing on
Mirror To The Sky
With every studio recording, live album or tour announcement, there’s
always a faction of fans who will turn up on a corner of the internet
waving their ‘No Jon Anderson, No Yes’ banners. Their zeal is only matched by the nearby counter-demonstration shaking their ‘No Peter Banks, No Yes’ placards.
But
time and events have moved on and maybe the ‘No Anderson’ contingent
should too. In the aftermath of the singer’s unceremonious departure 15
years ago, we’ve since lost Chris Squire and Alan White, a stark reminder, should it be needed, that life is really
too short to spend time grinding gears over something we have no
control over. Rather than exercising well-worn prejudices and allowing
expectations to become self-fulfilling prophecies, isn’t it better to
approach a new album with an open mind?
If 2021’s The Quest represented a return to some kind of form after the bland torpor of 2014’s Heaven & Earth, Mirror To The Sky feels like another useful step forward in Yes’ apparently never-ending story. There’s a good reason they released Cut From The Stars
as a digital single ahead of the album: it has more hooks in it than an
angler’s bag. With a cascading string motif; vibrant rays of organ;
spiky, undulating bass; bubbling guitars; dead-ahead drumming and
ecstatic skipping vocals, it moves with determined energy and purpose.
Setting out the stall of a band that have now been fully rejuvenated
with the installation of drummer Jay Schellen, it’s a track that has
urgency and power in abundance. Or, to put it another way, it fucking
rocks.
Those catchy qualities continue with All Connected
– its expansive feel seamlessly unrolls from one section to another,
making the musical connectivity work with consummate ease. While taking
disparate elements and welding them into something functional and
cohesive is pretty much what Yes are best known for, there’s an argument
that it’s not been done as elegantly as this for quite some time. If
the chorus of Luminosity sounds, at times, like it might have
been rejected by the local Christian Fellowship for being too
happy-clappy, it’s at least bookended with an engagingly upbeat
arrangement. The same cannot be said for the plodding dreariness of Living Out Their Dream, an unimaginative rocker whose by-the-numbers presence here is baffling.
That
lapse of judgement is mercifully brief and the title track restores
momentum. The piece showcases orchestral embellishments by Paul K Joyce,
whose work also graced The Quest. Mid-tempo rather than
magisterial, it nevertheless works well, with ethereal violin harmonics
adding a chilly trail in the wake of Howe’s contemplative fretwork. The
guitarist’s soloing throughout the track is especially good. At 75 years
old he might have slowed down in comparison to the flash of his youth,
but he demonstrates the wisdom of knowing that, in this case, a leaner,
cleaner melodicism will serve the song all the better. As principal
soloist and producer, Howe is ultimately free to overdub as many guitars
onto a track as he sees fit without fear of anyone telling him
otherwise, yet here he opts for a restrained approach that benefits the
album overall.
Yes’
internecine politics in the past have sometimes reduced the album-making
process into a passive-aggressive grudge match, wherein the band are
only able to work at the speed of the unhappiest member. By contrast,
this line-up has publicly stated that the spirit of cooperation and
mutual support evident during The Quest has continued to
flourish. Though it’s hard to objectively quantify, there’s a sense that
everyone being on the same page has brought optimism and coherence to
the music. Jon Davison’s charming ballad Circles Of Time, which
gently closes the album, though delicate on the surface, comes with a
real inner strength that’s due to the simplicity of its arrangement and
uncluttered sureness of its production.
As with The Quest, this album also comes with a three-track bonus disc. The best of these is the middling Unknown Place.
With its Hammond organ wig-out and solo cowbell section it seems
designed to provide some clap-along crowd participation when Yes next
get back on the road.
The long tail of Yes’ inventiveness during
the 1970s burns so intensely to this day that it’s inevitable that the
current band will likely always be judged against those past glories.
While Mirror To The Sky doesn’t scale those early innovative
heights and is unlikely to change the musical weather in the way the
band once did, when judged on its own merits, this is a set that stands
as the best Yes album in more than 20 years. Maybe it’s time to put down
the placards and listen.
A few weeks ago we featured a live 1974 recording of DSotM; tonight we spotlight the 50th Anniversary remastered recording of the original release.
The Dark Side of the Moon 50th Anniversary is a box set reissue of British progressive rock band Pink Floyd's original 1973 album. It was released on 24 March 2023 by Pink Floyd Records. Five digital-only singles were released to support the set.
The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 1 March 1973 by Harvest Records. Developed during live performances before recording began, it was conceived as a concept album
that would focus on the pressures faced by the band during their
arduous lifestyle, and also deal with the mental health problems of
former band member Syd Barrett, who departed the group in 1968. New material was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London.
The record builds on ideas explored in Pink Floyd's earlier
recordings and performances, while omitting the extended instrumentals
that characterised the band's earlier work. The group employed multitrack recording, tape loops, and analogue synthesisers, including experimentation with the EMS VCS 3 and a Synthi A. Engineer Alan Parsons was responsible for many of the sonic aspects of the recording, and for the recruitment of session singer Clare Torry, who appears on "The Great Gig in the Sky".
The Dark Side of the Moon explores themes such as conflict, greed, time, death and mental illness. Snippets from interviews with the band's road crew and others are featured alongside philosophical quotations. The sleeve, which depicts a prismatic spectrum, was designed by Storm Thorgerson in response to keyboardist Richard Wright's
request for a "simple and bold" design which would represent the band's
lighting and the album's themes. The album was promoted with two
singles, "Money" and "Us and Them".
The Dark Side of the Moon is among the most critically
acclaimed albums and often features in professional listings of the
greatest of all time. It brought Pink Floyd international fame, wealth
and plaudits to all four band members. A blockbuster release of the album era, it also propelled record sales throughout the music industry during the 1970s. The Dark Side of the Moon is certified 14 times platinum in the United Kingdom, and topped the US Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, where it has charted for 981 weeks. As of 2013, The Dark Side of the Moon has sold over 45 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling album of the 1970s and the fourth-best-selling album in history.[4] In 2012, the album was selected for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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