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This section is dedicated to discussion of the band called "Yes". The group has been long-lived, releasing its first album in 1969 titled "Yes," with recent albums continuing into the 2000s.
Popular Opinion
- Misguided/incorrect album reviews (not mine, local copy, removed eye-damaging backgrounds, original site no longer exists)
- Much better page of reviews of various albums. Scott Moore's opinions are dead-on.
Yes Marathon
A friend and I recently held our own personal Yes-a-thon in which we listened to every CD ever released by Yes in order of release, back to back, non-stop, starting at midnight and running until about 11am the following morning. Photos, and perhaps video clips from the event will be available soon. We each individually ranked our preference for every song as we heard it, and the Excel file containing our ratings can be found here. And here is an html version of the same file. The first column is the album name, then track number, then song title, then my friend's ranking (lower is better), then my ranking, then the sum of our rankings, then my ranking minus his ranking.
I also added up the total scores for each album and placed them in this Excel file. Here's the html version. Again, lower scores are better. The first column is album name, then my score, then my friend's score, then my score minus his, then the sum of our scores. If you sort the data on the last column, you will get the ranking of albums determined by the opinions of two different people. Please note that the rankings are far from perfect because our attention levels declined over the 11 hour listening period and we noticed that we tended to place songs from the same CD closer to each other in the ranking than they should have been. Also, any errors in our assessment of a song can affect future rankings because we use prior rankings when deciding where to insert a song in the list of preferences. Also, short songs that have very low scores really hurt an album more than it deserves. For example, my friend didn't like the 30 second song Five Percent for Nothing from Fragile, and Fragile's score became much higher (worse) than it deserved since the song was only 30 seconds long. A better system could have been used, but at the cost of more effort on our part. But, nonetheless, the list should be interesting.
Prior to the Yes-a-thon, I made my own list of the top 34 Yes songs (I was going to do 30, but I just had to add the last four) just based upon my knowledge of Yes music and by flipping through and looking at all the song titles. For a few CDs, I had to listen to a few of the tracks to remember which song was which. That list can be found here. Compare my results to those from the survey in Notes from the Edge Vol. 107 And I didn't know about this or any other such survey when I did my own experiment, so the results should be independent.
One cool thing to notice is that both studies agree on the top five albums (but not their order): Tales from Topographic Oceans, Close to the Edge, Relayer, Going for the One, and The Yes Album. Both studies agree that Union and Big Generator are rock bottom, but my friend and I like Talk and Tormato way more than the NTFE study group. We all agree that Awaken is the number one song. But as for the worst song, I don't know what the NTFE people are talking about. They chose Arriving UFO which ranked #12 on my list. You may not like the song, but how can you possibly say that it's worse than Rhythm of Love, Almost Like Love and Love Will Find a Way? You can't.
My Yes Story
I was around 13 years old when I first heard Yes (I suppose that prior to that, I probably heard a couple of the really well known radio hits such as Owner of A Lonely Heart or even Roundabout, but I certainly had no idea that I was hearing Yes at the time). One day after a lesson, my string bass teacher asked me if I'd be interested in borrowing a CD and seeing what I thought of it. He said it was pretty crazy stuff, and certainly not everybody's piece of cake, but I was open minded and had a great respect for him, so I thought I'd give it a go. So, he sent me home with Relayer.
At first, it was certainly interesting, but I didn't really like it that much. A couple days later I listened to it again, and it was definately neat to re-experience the unusual sounds that my ear had never heard the likes of before. By listening number three, I was hooked. Now, seven years later, I have 10 pages in my CD binder filled with Yes or Yes related music (such as band member solo albums, collaboration CDs, and the like), with each page holding 8 CDs, so I have about 80 Yes or near-Yes CDs. The music is completely unlike anything else, it's too difficult to explain why Yes is so great. You just have to listen to it, and I don't mean hear it, I mean listen to it. After giving it some serious attention a couple times, you can then use it as background music as well, but you'll never get into it if you treat it like normal radio music from the start. Relayer is definately an exciting way to be introduced to Yes, although it can be too extreme for some people, so something cool but tamer might be a good idea for a first listening. Nevertheless, I usually start people on Relayer.
Yes Links
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