YES: Close To The Edge (PROGRESSIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Close to the Edge is considered by many to be the second piece in the Fragile - Close To the Edge - Relayer trilogy that establishes Yes as one of the leaders of the progressive movement of the 70's alongside Genesis and King Crimson. The album continues the exploration of the starred paths that had been discovered in the previous album ("Fragile"): long pieces orchestrated like pieces of classical music, instruments little used by rock bands like organs or harps and texts that mix dream and mysticism.

Produced by Eddie Offord, the album also highlights the talent of each of the members of the group, which was then in its first golden age. Jon Anderson's voice seems to come from another planet like a celestial angel while the rhythmic line of Chris Squire and Bill Bruford holds the album like an Atlas holding the universe in its arms.

As for Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman, they definitively set the sound of the band, especially in the eponymous track for the keyboardist or in Siberian Khatru for the future guitarist of GTR. More accomplished than Fragile, Close to the Edge is in the lineage of theme or concept albums like the Beatles' Sgt Pepper or Marvin Gaye's What's Going on in different genres. The album also opens the era of pharaonic concerts/shows with its heavenly scenery stamped with the rounded logo that is now part of the icons of modern rock alongside the tongue of the Rolling Stones or the Zombie on the covers of Iron Maiden.

Released recently and completely remastered, Close to the Edge has not aged a wrinkle thirty years later, even if it may appear to some as a little too marked by a psychedelic era where one dared to proclaim loud and clear " We are from the sun ", but this is another story. - Official website

YES

CLOSE TO THE EDGE

ATLANTIC RECORDS

PROGRESSIVE ROCK