TALES FROM TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS

(2.6/5)

9 ? Best Song: Go to hell.

And where Close to the Edge was fresh, engaging, and, dare I say, exciting, the band decided that epics were the way to go, and that music was only useful if it was set to be the most superfluously extreme. I could wage a massive slew of insults toward this album, about the guitars that seem so disjointed and aimless that they rarely constitute a full riff or melody, and how Jon Anderson's singing is slowly starting to grate on my nerves, or how the keyboard strikes have become a pedestrian series of running through the motions for the sake of internal congruity and that star wars lightsaber sheen, or how the album is a double album with only four songs.

I have all these insults, yet to be perfectly honest, I don't see why the album is hated so much. Okay, excepting what I just spent the last paragraph spurting I don't see why the album is hated so much. It isn't as if all talent mystically burst from their corporeal forms and transcended the material universe to allow venus jesus the ability to do a rapid fire hammer on in his venusian garage rock band. They had to leave in layers. Sure, 'The Revealing' is a sprawling (unavoidable epithet) mess, but when it rocks, doesn't it, though?

Okay bub, you spend the first paragraph bashing the album and the second one defending it. Where exacty do you stand? I stand on the fence. For one, I'm still entranced by the interplay between te rhythm section and Steve Howe's always shimmering performances. On the other hand I'm sick to death of these long fucking songs that go absolutely nowhere, and act as mere astral jazz fusion jams for the hard of hearing. All I can say is that prog rock fans might adore it, and everyone else probably won't. Personally, I will probably never listen to it again. It's just not melodically appealing to me. It's not original, and it's not necessary. It's just there, man.

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