TALES FROM TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS

Love it or hate it ! Before my review the "stars distribution of the over 600 ratings is as follows:

Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music(45%) Excellent addition to any prog rock music collection(28%) Good, but non-essential (17%) Collectors/fans only (7%) Poor. Only for completionists (3%)

There aren't many albums with so controversial ratings from 1 to 5 stars, let's try to explain why: First of all, the original release was a double album with a 20 minutes track (more or less) on each side. Soembody has found it pretentious, but we know that YES are often pretentious. Soembody says that the tracks have been extended to 20 minutes in order to fill exactly the four sides, and this is possible.

My personal opinion is that this is not the best YES album, but one of their best for sure. The four suites are excellent in the composition and in the execution even if none of the four is comparable to things like Close To The Edge. Said so, I have probably payed more listens to this one than to the CTTE masterpiece, and the reason is that Tales works well on me. It's never boring and even if I have heard that Wakeman was not much happy of this album, his work is excellent. Only "Nous Sommes Du Soleil" is a bit weaker. I find the intro a bit too long.

So I add myself to the 28%, but I can understand who says that it's a masterpiece and who finds it poor. This is how the real art works.