It *may* however, have been the first big commercial album made on a DAW on a Mac in what amounted to a project studio. Although even there you can argue that the drum tracks were done in a "pro" studio. The lines were still more clearly drawn between the two than they are now...Originally Posted by Mister Triscuits
I like Talk alot too. State of Play has always been a favorite of mine. Light years better than Big Generator. Endless Dream meanders some, but has a killer beginning and ending. My fav of the Yeswest albums for sure!, since I'm burnt on most of 90125, except for Changes, Hearts, and Our Song.
I think it was Summer In Paradise.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_in_Paradise
This thread will be a great motivator to go back and listen to Talk...I liked the album, loved the tour, still think Endless Dream is overrated, though.
However, the most overlooked, under-rated Yes album to me is surely KTA II. Talk was a cool, unique moment in time in the history of Yes, but KTA truly had the power to reunite the classic-Yes era with the modern 90's era...and somehow it totally failed to connect with the public despite its inherent strengths...whether that's solely on the record label, or just general apathy/ignorance of their former fans, I don't know. As someone in this post commented, what more could you want? Yes finally playing prog again in their classic style, and doing it well! And I have to disagree with anyone who says the songs were not there -- I think the material is excellent...Bring Me to the Power is a Steve Howe tour de force, Footprints is an excellent song, Mind Drive a really strong latter-day epic, I even like the diversity of Children of Light and Sign Language. To me, it's a perfect Yes album for the 90's which brings back a retro-classic Yes vibe, but still having some modern sensibilities...and just the 5 of them playing on it, without Billy, Igor, or extra studio musicians playing (I hope!). I like what they went on to do with some of The Ladder and especially Magnification, but I will always think that with KTA II, Yes brought the goods and the record label totally wasted them.
Sometimes I'm amazed that any semblance of a band called Yes is still standing, given all of the fumbles they, their managers and their record labels have made in their career.
I don't understand all the negative whining about Talk; it's clearly the gutsiest, freshest and most adventurous Yes album featuring Rabin. And this is regardless of how much of the bass parts Squire is or isn't playing (I hear plenty of him in 'The Calling' and 'The Endless Dream', and I remember reading an interview with him when the album came out in which he said how proud he was of the discipline and awareness of what was needed for the bass part of 'Real Love' - he said something like he felt he had matured as a musician to be able to not plaster the music with notes for the sake of it). More to the point, the partnership between Rabin and Anderson was flourishing here like it never had before - and Anderson's vocal performance on this album is probably his most versatile and technically secure on record.
It's obvious to me that Rabin was to NOT to blame for every aspect of poor music Yes made between 1980 and 1995, and, on the contrary, was fully responsible for pretty much every good thing they DID produce during that time. For example, 'Miracle of Life' and 'Lift me up' blow almost all of the dysfunctional ABWH II tracks out of the water (I should note that I prefer ABWH to any of the 80s YesWest stuff, so nobody was more surprised than me about where the high points of 'Union' came from).
OK, so 'Talk' doesn't feature mellotrons and moogs, Spanish guitars, etc., whereas it does feature catchy choruses and strong guitar-driven instrumental hooks. For me, that makes it closer to the spirit of 'The Yes Album' than most of what the band has produced since. I'm not saying the style is similar, but when I hear "State of Play", "The Calling" and "Endless Dream", I hear a band that was motivated to stay contemporary and energised, and that was making music moving on from what they'd done in the last decade.
I don't think Yes has been like that again very often since; maybe 'The Ladder' and bits of 'KTA2' showed genuine promise, but on the whole I think 'Talk' is one of their best albums since the mid-70s. So, yes, I think Rabin and Anderson are absolutely right that the album is unfairly under-rated.
Talk is an album that divides fans. Some see it as a brand new direction, others are bored. I'm in the latter camp. There's little on Talk I dislike, but there's equally little that excites me ("Real Love" probably my favourite track). I don't say this because I wanted Mellotrons and Moogs: I love 90125 and Big Generator. Rabin's Jacaranda is one of the best Yes-related albums of recent years. But Talk... it's just dull.
If I remember correctly, it was the record company who requested the band do an old-style epic, thus "Endless Dream". It seems to me odd to describe a song based on a 20-year old format as "contemporary", but I do like "Silent Spring". "State of Play" and "The Calling" might have been contemporary 5 years earlier, but in a year dominated by Nirvana, Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails on one side, and Blur and Oasis on the other, they seem to me a bit out of tune with then fashion.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
This is a cynical tactic I've noticed you often employ on here- a classic 'straw man' argument intended to imply that all prog fans listen to is prog. For the record I think '90125' is terrific and genuinely fresh as you claim to 'Talk' to be (bringing 'New Pop' production values into a rock band, a real innovation...and the 'New Pop' thing isn't my bag as such), and I enjoy about half of 'Big Generator'. Neither of those feature Mellotrons to the best of my knowledge!
As for the 'Keys' albums, their heart was in the right place- a significant amount of mostly freshly composed material, by the classic band- but it's not much better than 'Talk' in my view. Their only 90s album I play much is 'The Ladder'.
In the 90s it's hard to say what would have worked for them commercially. I think some damage had probably been done to their fanbase- which had remained sizeable beforehand- by the 'Union' debacle. I think it's a shame that in this particular period, Yes with Jon and also ABWH couldn't have co-existed.
Last edited by JJ88; 05-12-2014 at 07:52 AM.
What hurt the band most commercially in the '90s, I would suggest, is...
1) Some poor music. Union, Open Your Eyes and, to a lesser extent, Talk are among the band's least popular albums.
2) The abrupt changes in style and band membership from album to album, from ABWH to Union to Talk to the Keys albums to Open Your Eyes to The Ladder. You didn't know what Yes you were getting and they kept undermining any attempt to re-build the fanbase.
3) Changing musical fashions. The 1980s sound that had found the band new fans was now becoming as dated as their 1970s sound has been in the 1980s.
4) Gaps in touring: they were away from the public eye for too long.
5) Perhaps a symptom as much as a cause, but they kept moving record label.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
^I agree with that and have said similar about the changed directions on the 90s albums before, I meant this 'Talk' period particularly. Probably the smaller labels didn't help either.
What is unfortunate is that in Jon and Rick's last period with Yes, they were back in the big venues again, and even had a big hit album with that 'Ultimate Yes' compilation. In retrospect it's a great shame that nothing new came out then to consolidate that. Or indeed, if they had toured with Rick in the 90s alongside the 'Keys' albums.
When I was getting into prog/rock pretty heavy around 1999 or so I do remember being recommended KTA2 specifically by fans on internet forums. I was suprised at how good it was. No it wasn't the second coming but it was a return to form. I still haven't heard KTA1 studio tracks. The reviews of that one are even more negative. When "Keys Studio" was released I didn't bother with it either. I never bother with the KTA2 live disk for that matter. The album that seems to get a lot of praise, and it really surprises me is The Ladder. I've kept that album for the 2 tracks that are worth anything on that album. I've tried to sit through the whole thing many times and I just can't stand it. If you take the two 8-9 minute tracks and burn them on a CDr with KTA2 (studio) you've got the best YES music they produced for the previous 20 years up to that point (imo). When Magnification came out it looked great on paper. Seemed like a great idea at the time. Rock bands recording with orchestras was a huge trend at the time. Kansas did it, Metallica did it, etc. Anyway, I got rid of Magnification before it ever got to the point that I would despise it. I never gave it much of a chance but I really couldn't stand it. It was at that point that I just really got sick of this rock band + orchestra craze.but KTA truly had the power to reunite the classic-Yes era with the modern 90's era...and somehow it totally failed to connect with the public despite its inherent strengths...whether that's solely on the record label, or just general apathy/ignorance of their former fans, I don't know. As someone in this post commented, what more could you want? Yes finally playing prog again in their classic style, and doing it well!
ABWH had effectively collapsed under internal tensions and poor relationships anyway. It would have been difficult in those terms for the band to have continued, whatever the relationship with the other Yes.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
"That, That Is" on Keys to Ascension is pretty good, I think. At least, it starts pretty good, but kind of loses the plot towards and just meanders towards an end. The shorter "Be the One" is less popular, more reflective of Squire's 1990s work, but I like it. (You also get the only release for "Unity", Howe's live intro to "Onward".) You can get it cheaply.
Keystudio merely compiles the studio tracks from the two albums, except it has an alternative intro to "Children of Light" from Wakeman, which is terrible and far worse than the previously released version of the song.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
Grunge and Britpop both had a pretty strong retro streak. Ironic that a Yes album built on more advanced, cutting edge technology actually came out sounding dated compared to the music happening around it. A more retro, analog sounding Yes album choc full of that Old School Weird A$$ Sh*t TM might have actually come off as more edgy and modern and positioned Yes as spiritual godfather to Flaming Lips, Neutral Milk Hotel, Mercury Rev, Stereolab and so forth the way Neil Young was associated with grunge, Ray Davies with Britpop and so forth.
Even now a couple of the most widely acclaimed rock albums of the last few years are by Tame Impala...Analog synths, quirky surreal songwriting.
I saw Magnification more as the band reaching back to their sixties roots than cashing in on some Rock Band+Orchestra trend. Think TAAW 2.0. Fitting and poetic IMHO that if Magnification turns out to be Anderson's last Yes album that it should be an album that hearkens back to the band's earliest days.
Last edited by Frumious B; 05-12-2014 at 10:25 AM.
I can't really speak with any certainty on this as I was too young to be into Yes at the time, but I'm guessing that they were much less favourably regarded in the 90s than they are now. Prog in general still seems to have had a poor reputation then. These days it's not uncommon to have bands namedrop someone like Yes (indeed, I've seen someone from the aforementioned Tame Impala do just that) in a positive light. About the only one of the bigger prog bands I rarely see namechecked is ELP, for whatever reason.
I believe that whatever they did in the 90s wouldn't have gotten them any 'cred'. Nevertheless with 'Talk', I personally think that album was 'stuck in the 80s' in terms of its general sound and style. At the same time, the 90s wasn't far removed enough from the 80s for there to be any kind of 'retro' appeal of such a move IMHO.
Also consider that one of the biggest albums of 1995 on both sides of the Atlantic was Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, a long winded, epic, double "concept" album labeled pretentious by some that has some obvious roots in the progressive rock of the 1970s. Billy Corgan hasn't ever name checked Yes as far as I know, but he's name checked Rush.
I agree that it meanders quite a bit in the middle, but it comes together at the end for Howe's guitar solo and the final verse.
It is terrible, but it's fortunately short and doesn't detract from the song in any meaningful way. I can't believe Rick Wakeman got so fussy over that.It has an alternative intro to "Children of Light" from Wakeman, which is terrible and far worse than the previously released version of the song.
I'd bought KTA1 and 2 on cassette, but I was glad to just get Keystudio on CD, since the live tracks were kind of lifeless anyway, and all I really wanted was the new material.
"Arf." -- Frank Zappa, "Beauty Knows No Pain" (live version)
My preference is Keystudio for the studio recordings and the "live" tracks from both KTA volumes sequenced in concert running order. It makes for a more orderly Yes catalog in iTunes. I need to do a shoot out with the two versions of "Children of Light" though to figure out which I like better.
Last edited by Frumious B; 05-12-2014 at 11:16 AM.
Okay, here goes: Talk was easily the best of the Rabin years. 90125 was a pretty good pop album, Big Generator was a dull concoction with a couple of decent songs and horrid production (those "stick hitting a tabletop" snare drums? Ew). Talk came out, and it was a fresh album, a true collaboration between Jon and Trevor, a real "combining influences and thrusting forward" type of recording. The production although a wee bit sterile, was better than any other Rabin/Yes album, and WAY better than BG.
Is it perfect? No. Is it classic Yes? No. Is it good? Hell yeah. I consider it the best thing since GftO, with maybe The Ladder after that.
KtA failed on both accounts to me; horrid sterile "live" renditions of classic Yes ("live" my ass - it was overdubbed so much that there was no more life in it), and half-baked unfinished snippets of ideas for Yes songs that were unfortunately stitched together badly and released. Magnification was obviously missing any input from Steve Howe, which might have made it a decent album, or at least given it a chance. OYE, well, enough has been written on that. A couple of decent pop songs, that's about it. FFH was pleasant AOR adult contemporary, but not what I look for from Yes.
So, I like Talk pretty well. I thought it was a good effort, the most interesting of the Rabin years.
Gnish-gnosh borble wiff, shlauuffin oople tirk.
Cynical? Yes maybe.
Tactic? No, not really.
Classic straw man argument? Erm, no, I really have no idea what people listen to - but I do know a lot of Yes fans seem to want certain kinds of things from the band. Hardly a controversial perspective on my part! My remark was meant in good humour, not as a put-down.
Intended to imply[...]? Nope! I had no intention to imply anything about anyone else. Perhaps you read too much into it.
I suppose that the best method of defence (for an album I genuinely really like a lot), is an element of attack. For instance, I often respect the good sense Henry brings to much of what goes on around here, but I simply disagree with him quite strongly about 'Talk'. It's an album he clearly has antipathy towards every time its brought up in discussion (which, for an album that so many seem to dislike with such hostility, is strangely often - and always with a few people ardently defending it and praising it; something you won't find much regarding 'Open Your Eyes' or the bulk of 'Union').
Such disagreement is just one of those things (we all experience that negative feeling regarding some work by our beloved heroes, even if our choices vary). But I don't agree with some of the supposed reasoning that's leveled against the album at the expense of a fair consideration of its merits, which to me are genuine. For me, most of Talk, some of KTA2 and most of The Ladder are the only really high points in Yes's studio discography since the early 80s. I tend to pick and mix from all the other work done since 'Going for the One' (and that includes 'Drama', which I think many folks on here tend to over-rate on account of it having three really good tracks).
Take, for instance, the argument that "The Endless Dream" was rehashing a 20-year old formula. That seems a strange condemnation to me because musically its production, playing and use of vocal harmony (such as that fantastic modulation on "Dream" at its climax) are far more breathtaking and inspiring than some of the tracks of comparable length Yes produced both before and since. But I concede graciously (I hope!) Henry's point that in the mid-90s the soundscape of YesWest was no longer "contemporary". That's a fair riposte, and Henry's probably right from the point of view he presents. But on its own terms the music in "Endless Dream" reaches that high euphoric level (to my ears) that only the very best Yes music does, regardless of what period or line-up its from. I'm pretty adamant that it's by far the best Yes album by this line-up, even if it's the line-up almost none of us wanted.
Warm regards to all, and no offence to anyone intended.
Last edited by Dodie; 05-12-2014 at 11:25 AM.
Bravo!!
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
That's where I saw the tour as well, SteveSly. I had the same idea as you about a more agressive Yes. It was cool to show people that they could, in fact, rock. But what was the deal with Tony's keyboards. He had such a small rig. Was there only one board?
The older I get, the better I was.
^^^^BINGO
kaye had his two Yamaha KX’s facing the stage and his hammond at 90° angle to the left. rabin used a keyboard for the piano intro to AYAi and anderso also had a synth behind kaye’s rig for sounds and effects. i am sure (only have the santiago concert on DVD to double-chek) that sherwood also played some augmentary keys on stage.
I think Talk may be the only Yes album I've never heard a single track from (as far as I can recall, anyway). I was completely unaware of it's existence until the 2000's, and by then just assumed I wouldn't be interested. It's funny to me that the first Yes album I heard from start to finish was 90125, at the time of it's release. Back then, I didn't know much of anything about Yes, and had only heard the "hit's" from the 70's (All Good People, Roundabout, possibly Long Distance Runaround). So to me at the time, being 14 years old, it was pretty good stuff. By the time Big Generator came out, I was in college and getting heavily into the 70's Yes material. So the couple of tracks I heard on the radio from BG really turned me off of that formation of Yes.
I guess sometime I should find it on Spotify or something and give it a listen. I'd probably judge it more fairly now than I would have back when it was released.
I also want to say that both KTA's I loved when they came out, both the studio and live material. I prefer KTA2's studio stuff now, and KTA1's live renditions. Frankly though, those two releases are just about the only things I have really enjoyed from Yes since Going For The One. I have yet to hear Drama all the way through, but I've heard the 3 tracks everyone raves about and they are indeed quite good. Still not sure I need to own the album though. Magnification had potential, but for me Anderson ruins what might otherwise have been a decent album (and I love Anderson's vocals most of the time). It just seems like vocals dominate the album to the point that the music seems secondary, and the lyrics are mostly unoriginal and new agey to the point of ridiculousness. For me, anyway. Fly From Here is basically geriatric prog mostly composed by non-Yes members (okay, Downs is an official Yes member now and was during the making of the album, but he hadn't been in the band for two decades when they started making the album). It just seems lifeless to me, and a poor attempt at recreating the Yes magic of old. Still, bits of the "epic" are good and the final track is their best in years. Overall though, not something I listen to much.
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