CLOSE TO THE EDGE

Even you may have already surfed through dozens of similar reviews about this album, I might as well offer my view on it. "Close to the Edge" is, for me, definitely the best YES album. "Fragile" is up there fighting for the podium, but doesn't achieve the consistency of this one. Granted, it might sound not so complicated to achieve consistency when you only have 3 songs (wish there were more though, if only for the sake of diversity) but these long tracks have a lot to offer. The title song is one of the best "longer-than-15-minutes" songs I've ever heard, and it's also one of the few that does not feel like a series of short songs joined together (like Genesis' Supper's Ready) but like a consistent, multi-part rock opera. Then comes the beautiful "And You And I" which is one of the more gentle melodies that YES ever came up with (Check the "Soon" segment of Gates of Delirium for THE MOST beautiful one), and "Siberian Khatru" is a most needed up tempo song that features one of the best bass guitar-keyboard interaction I've stumbled upon in my life. By the way, Wakeman's presence is better utilized here that in many other YES albums, while the other members do their usual excellent job. My biggest "complaint" might be the final 3 o 4 minutes of "Khatru", which irritate me enough to want to stop the record before it finishes... but anyway it's been a remarkable journey up to that point.