THE LADDER

To be honest my perception of Yes starts a lot before with Tormato (the Rejoice part especially) and follow the road up to The Yes Album, but this one was the first disc post GFTO that I've used to listen deeply as a proghead (Tormato was simply an intro for a child), so this was my first album of modern Yes, and I must say that I like it. It's not a masterpiece and we got some ugly parts, Can I & If Only You Knew as well as some non-prog parts, but here we see something new in Yes, new ideas and finally the feel that 80s are gone! There is a new brand of music, different from masterpieces of '71-'77 but still good as only few can be. The intro of the title track explain that their style is different from the classic but even if someone can be scared about hard Yes they will become more and more amazed to see that the old music is still there from the last part of the title track to The River till New Language crossing a powerfull Finally with nice works on guitars, Hep Yadda and Lightning Strikes remarks some lower profile (Rabin era the first, while Strikes is just poor compared to the others even with the work of Howe & Squire on it). Everything leave the place for the end: Longwalker a strange track, mostly atmosphere that uses the voice from Anderson like a charm, nothing prog but nice enough.

So can anyone climb this ladder? Oh maybe if they were not Yes this album would be the best, but they are and they have made CTTE and other masterpieces, then what the rating? 3 and an half, rounded to 4 'cause they were yes long time ago, and their music suvived in some way.

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