TALES FROM TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS

This album is incredibly hard to appreciate. It took me a while to get into it, but each track features so many ethereal passages that paint such nice pictures. Featuring four songs, each of which hovers around the twenty minute mark, this album marks a pretty big stylistic change to earlier ones by Yes. Gone are most of the catchy melodies, and they instead are replaced by longer compositions which feature many solos and interludes/instrumentals.

The Revealing Science of God is more like Yes's previous works than the other songs. It's the catchiest on the album, though that isn't really saying much. The melodies are great, and it's as good as any other extended Yes song really. The same holds true for the following song The Remembering, which isn't quite as catchy. At first listen I thought that it was pretty overdrawn, but it's grown greatly on me.. The Ancient has some wonderful acoustic passages and one of Howe's better solos. Ritual is probably my favorite on the album. This song isn't exactly catchy, but it's pretty beautiful. The melodies are pretty incredible and beautiful.

It was hard for me to get through the entire 80 minutes of the album when I first got it, and it's still not really a casual listening record for me, but this album ultimately defines the word "progressive."