An album that is both hated and loved with equal fervour - I take the latter view. It is a fantastic achievement by a band many of us thought were dead after the Drama line-up broke down.
Squire and White had teamed up with a relatively little-known guitarist and songwriter from South Africa called Trevor Rabin, following an aborted liaison with Jimmy Page, whilst Howe had hit commercial heaven and oodles of money with Asia. The project was called Cinema, but when the material was played to Anderson by Squire (who, no doubt, had half a mind on the commercial prospects of bringing him back into the fold), Anderson loved it and Yes was reborn. To add even more credibility to the project, they recruited...err... Tony Kaye, virtually unheard of since The Yes Album.
This is pop rock with shades of progressive music. It is NOT classic Yes prog, but, as with some of the Collins era Genesis LP's, it contained more than enough of past glories to keep everyone happy.
Owner of a Lonely Heart was a massive hit, and deservedly so. It is simply a joyful pop song, with great lyrics and musicianship from a band enjoying each other company. People who would not have thought about purchasing a Yes track flocked to buy it, and I'll wager that more than a few ventured onto Close to the Edge and other classics as a result.
I like Hold On, especially Kaye's keyboards, which are simple, but very effective. It Can Happen was the second single, and it is equally as good as the first, it contains exceptional guitar and bass lines, whilst White excels, as always, on drums.
Changes is a vast departure from previous Yes, but Anderson belts out the lyrics again to a thunderous rhythm section. It also features terrific xylophone. Cinema is the track that celebrates the original intention of Squire, White, and Rabin and is a fantastic instrumental that features all three at the top of their game, especially Rabin who produces a magnificent solo. I also love the Anderson chant at the end. Leave It features a Capello and is probably the weakest track on the album - enjoyable, different, but ultimately a curiosity really. I do love Squire's vocals on it though.
Our Song is a track more in keeping with previous albums, and I again really enjoy Kaye's keyboards - he shines on this LP. City of Love is probably the weirdest thing that Anderson has ever agreed to sing lyrics to. No twee hippy posturing here, just a very bleak song about the darker side of life and love. It's also very good, especially Squire's bass.
They leave the very best until last. Hearts is simply stunning, with both Anderson & Rabin excelling on vocals extolling the virtues of love and being together with someone who cares. Yes, it is romantic, but what on earth is wrong with that? Rabin's guitar work is spectacular, and, again, the harmonies by all doing vocals are incredible. A fantastic way to end the album.
In the distance, Howe, somewhat hypocritically given Asia's material, fumed, and moaned about it not being Yes and being too commercial. A lot of traditional Yes fans also hated it, for much the same reason. I consider myself a traditional Yes fan, and I thought, and still think, it is a marvellous LP. It is full of great music, lyrics, and excellent production from Trevor Horn of Drama fame (easily better as a producer in my opinion).
It is an essential purchase for anyone wishing to have a full understanding of the history of the band, the change in direction the band took in the '80s, and the subsequent machinations between Yes West & East.
Utterly essential commercial progressive music. Ignore the doubters - buy it and enjoy.
I hadn't listened to this in many years, an album which, I think, stands up quite well and is certainly better than many of the more disparaging reviews it has received.
What you will not get is pure prog from this album. Instead, this is The Moodies, a band who always crossed the boundary between pop and prog anyway, in full blown 1980's mode. If you hated all things musical in that decade, this one will not persuade you otherwise. If, however, you appreciate well written and well performed pop/rock/prog crossover music, this one has plenty to please you.
The opening track, Blue World, is a rollicking track in the finest tradition of the band, and a great way to open proceedings.
Going Nowhere is a marvellous track, featuring Ray Thomas on lead vocal. Patrick Moraz, who was to leave the band under a massive cloud, shines on this.
For pure prog fans, the most bitter disappointment is that the wonderful instrumental, Hole In The World, only lasts just short of two minutes. The band could have done so much more with this track, and maybe providing the following segued track Under My Feet with more flesh to beef up what is undoubtedly a brilliantly performed piece of music, but ultimately a little shallow.
The star vocally, as throughout the band's lengthy career, is the gold tonsiled Justin Hayward, and he shines on Running Water, a wonderfully melancholic track which moves the band to their earlier work, with modern production values and a superb keyboard backdrop by Moraz to augment.
My favourite track, though, is another Thomas piece, the woefully short I Am, full of wondering flute, eastern promise, and symphonic vocals, and, again, a track which really should have been developed far more in terms of length and execution. Instead, to follow, we get Sorry, which, to these ears, returns Thomas to the worst of the 1970's music of his which has, in my opinion, dated so terribly in the intervening years.
Elsewhere, what we have is decent pop/rock, the highlight of which is Sitting At The Wheel, an enjoyable romp.
By 1983, this band really didn't give two hoots what critics threw at them. They had made a fortune (the stockbroker's rock band being the official custard pie to chuck at them) and were still selling out relatively large venues. However, with The Present, as with preceding albums post-Pinter, this was the sound of a band still striving to create new, and relevant, music.
Regrettably, it was often as much miss as hit. A good album which really could, and should, have been much better.
The follow up to the massive hit debut album, the wheels fell off the bandwagon with this one. It still did well commercially, although not as well as the first, and the cracks in the band's unity appeared, leading to years of feuds. In addition, the production makes it sound as if the band are playing down a telephone line from Antarctica.
Don't Cry is, of course, the Heat Of The Moment type single to set things off. It isn't as good and is bland without being insulting.
There are, however, still some magical moments and songs on the album. The Smile Has Left Your Eyes is a grandiose piece of pomp rock, and Wetton and Downes are magnificent on it. Actually, therein lies half of the problem with this. Steve Howe has been virtually produced and engineered out of proceedings, so whereas for the debut he was clear as a bell and by far the most important contributor, with this, and this track, you struggle to hear him clearly. No wonder he left.
Never In A Million Years is a very good pop rock track, and once again dominated by Geoff Downes parp parping away. Likewise, My Own Time is a fine pomp rock track, with a cracking chorus which sounds even better singing along after more than a few beers!
The highlight for me, though, is Midnight Sun, which is a glorious track, and amongst the finest any of them ever put down on vinyl. Sensitive, well played, emotional, it is a great track which puts you in mind of the fact that you knew the band were so much more capable than much of what is included on this album. It is also, and this is, of course, no coincidence, Steve Howe's finest contribution, featuring some incredible work.
Pardon the pun, but this album is no progression from the first. It was an attempt to create more of the same, and that was a mistake. Whereas the first one was a masterpiece of its kind, this one is merely a good rock album, and one that clearly would have benefited from the band taking a lot more time over all aspects of writing, recording, and playing.
A good album, but one which has non-essential written all over the wondrous Roger Dean cover creation.
Reading an article on the band in the latest issue of Classic Rock Presents Prog made me dig out this album from 1983.
By this time, the old stereotype of kaftans and hippie dreamers was long gone, and this album, especially, marked them out as seeking to pursue a lighter, prog inspired, pop direction.
It is not a masterpiece, but I do think it has been a little harshly judged, because Lees and Holroyd have produced on this album some exceptional pieces of music.
The title track is brilliant, Paraiso Dos Cavalos an enjoyable nonsense, and I also enjoy the melancholic feel of Fifties Child.
However, the highlight of this, and one of the band's finest, is Waiting For The Right Time, a plaintive call to a loved one who simply will not, or cannot, respond. Set against a backdrop of light synths, gentle guitar work, and fine percussive work from the much-missed Mel Pritchard, it is the type of track to which love should be made after a massive emotional moment such as making up after a huge fight.
By no means essential, this is a good album, and certainly one that fans of lighter prog will very much enjoy.
Whilst for many the 1980's was a dark and miserable place to be for 70's prog fans, for me it was a period of renewal in the genre, and this album was one of the main reasons for it.
I had read a review of Market Square Heroes in Sounds music paper, went out and brought it, lapped it up as any fan of classic Genesis would, saw them live in The Marquee in London before the LP was even released, where they did, of course, showcase most of this material. It blew my mind away and started a love affair with the band which has lasted ever since. Of course, the lasting impression was of that giant, mad, Scottish man with face paint whose voice carried with it just a little bit more of a passing resemblance to Gabriel.
The album starts off ever so strongly with the title track, a maudlin paean to love's lost dream. For a single bloke still in his teens, the bitterness and recrimination rang very true, and the exceptional guitar work by Rothery and Kelly's lilting guitars, combined with a strong bass section by Trewavas, all in the style of the prog I loved, was just too good to resist.
He Knows You Know was the single from the album and continued off where the Market Square EP left off, commencing a tradition of strong singles that has lasted to the present day. It is catchy, sad, and angry, being a sorry tale of a young man descending into the chaos of hard drug use that has its inevitable end. The sad Jester alone in his bedsit indeed. The bass playing still amazes me now on this track, and the keyboards and guitar sing out an incredibly beautiful sad tale. The end section is angry and urgent.
The Web, which, of course, became the name of the fan club, is probably the one track that has, to these ears, not dated as well perhaps as the rest of the album. It is a long track at over eight minutes, but there is still much to enjoy. The differing moods keep the interest throughout, but it is still mainly one of sadness. I still listen to the musicians wondering how lucky I could be that a band had appeared that recreated, with a biting edge, my favourite type of music. Rothery, especially, sounds every bit as good as Hackett in his pomp with Genesis, and this is incredible given how young he was. Then, when Decisions Have Been Made, Mark Kelly comes in with quite the most exquisite keyboard passage which most certainly would have graced any Trespass, Nursery Cryme, et al. That is how good and relevant this band were.
Garden Party was another single and is a scream. Hugely amusing with Fish basically ripping the mickey out of the landed gentry with their ridiculous ways, it was a decent seller. It also gave the name to one of the finest gigs I have ever been to at Milton Keynes to celebrate the success of Misplaced Childhood.
Chelsea Monday should be on the playlist of every single prog rock fan. It tells the most tragic story of a young aspiring actress/model who was found dead and splattered all over the gutter press. The lead guitar by Rothery soars and makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up in sheer emotion. It should be impossible for a band as young as this to be so good. A special mention is owing to Mick Pointer for his sterling drum work in the rhythm section some 4.5 minutes in. The closing section has Rothery soaring above Fish almost crying out the tragic end to a wasted life. An exceptional piece of work.
The album closes with Forgotten Sons, a song written in the aftermath of Britain's war in The Falkland Islands and bomb outrages by the IRA. It remains one of the finest anti-war songs ever written in any genre. It is bitter, angry, spits out at you from start to finish, and is the best example of what Fish described at the time as new prog - bands who loved the old music, but had also lived through and learned from punk. The military timings of the denouement are not just clever, but also compelling.
This is an essential piece for any discerning prog rock collection, not just because of the quality of the music, although that deserves the rating itself, but also to appreciate how important it and the band are to the second wave of prog which started in the UK in the early 1980's. It tells stories with vital and real images.
Although a vastly different band now, this started off a career that has delighted and intrigued me for most of my adult life. Eternally grateful.....
As readers of my Genesis LP reviews will know, I am generally quite sympathetic to Collins era Genesis, especially Duke which I still think is a masterpiece. However, this is my least favourite Genesis album, and it pains me to say so.
Banks once said that the second side was the band's weakest moment, and he is right, because if I were reviewing the first side only, I would be gushing.
Mama is a great single, with some genuinely dark moments backed by menacing keyboards and a thundering drum intro to the beginning of the final sequence. It has obvious Exorcist connotations and continues the fine sequence of progressive pop singles the band were making.
Home by the Sea, and the Second.... are simply stunning prog pieces. The atmosphere created by Banks' swirling keyboards and then his main solo in the middle backed by Rutherford playing tightly with Collins huge drum machine sequence are a joy to listen to. There is not a dull moment on this first side, and listening to it for the first time, I was convinced that we had a major progressive landmark in the still relatively new decade.
Then they spoiled it by recording side two, quite the worst listening experience of my life.
I don't mind commercial music, if it's good commercial music, but Illegal Alien is absolutely dreadful, almost as bad as Whodunnit on the previous LP. It is a pointless piece of whimsey dressed up as social comment - it was neither, of course.
The rest of the side, I find just rather bland. Silver Rainbow has some very pleasant moments with progressive elements, and It's Gonna Get Better is a good pop song, if rather unremarkable. The damage, however, had been well and truly done by the time you got to this stage. I don't think I have listened to the second side for about ten years before putting it on tonight ahead of this review - it will be at least another ten years before I bother again.
They undoubtedly alienated many people with this LP and they had a lot of ground to make up with the next one.
I am torn on this album, because I believe that the 20 + minutes title track is incredibly good, whilst the rest of it varies between inspired and mediocre.
Crises is a cracker, with Simon Phillips on drums (previously very well known for his work with Pete Townsend and a tour with the Who especially) integrating well on deep and thunderous drums backing up a mainly keyboard orientated work, but with flashes of those inspired guitar bursts that only Oldfield can do. It is long, pure prog, and engages the listener from start to finish. I think it is amongst Oldfield's best work.
Of the rest, i.e., side two, Moonlight Shadow is simply a great single, and Maggie is on fantastic form. It's not prog, but a great pop single, and, like many great pop singles performed by prog artists, I am sure it brought many people to listen to music which they would not otherwise have done.
The Jon Anderson track, In High Places, will appeal to those who, like myself, have as much passion for his vocal solo work as inside Yes. It's a good track.
The rest I find insipid, with Oldfield even making a laughable play for the heavy metal market in his sleeve notes. I think that most, like me, will merely play the first three tracks and then move on to another LP.
This is a fantastic LP, and by far the best of the collaborations between these two.
Italian Song features Jon at his ethereal and emotional best, whilst the tribute to his daughter Deborah is simply stunning and beautiful, a masterwork of a man with such a creative voice and love of life. It's a love song that never fails to move me when I listen to it.
And When The Night Comes is again a very pleasant song. Polonaise and He is Sailing are both pleasant enough but not essential before you get to the prog masterpiece that is Horizons. Swirling heavy keyboards mix with Jon's plea for peace to finally come to our troubled planet. It has to be heard to be believed, and I think this is the track which Yes would have recorded had Vangelis joined them instead of Patrick Moraz - i.e., that line-up’s very own Close to the Edge.
This is not an LP which will challenge you intellectually or musically like most of the Yes output, but if, as I do, you believe that Jon Anderson and his vision of life and the world were essential to that band's output, then you will not fail to enjoy this celebration of a great voice and love songs.
On Armistice Day, it is perhaps appropriate to write a review of this, the last Floyd album recorded with Roger Waters, but what is, of course, a Waters solo album in all but name, with Gilmour and Mason adding their parts in a bit of a huff, and the latter even replaced on drums for the final track, Two Suns In The Sunset because "he can't do 7/8 time". Wright had been sacked by the great leader, and he had been replaced by Andy Brown and Michael Kamen, both of whom provided solid keyboard work. It was, in Mason's typically understated manner, "a difficult album to record".
There's the history, but is it any good? Does it deserve the panning it regularly gets? Yes, to the first question, and no to the second.
What people have to get is that this is a deeply personal work by Waters, in which he vents his spleen in a rage against the futility of war, the deeply dark and depressing reality of the state Britain was in at the time (1983 saw Thatcher effectively win an election by bashing the Argies in the Falklands War - many forget just how unpopular she was with unemployment at record levels), and, in fact, bemoaning the quality and decision making of virtually every single elected politician in the Western World, most of whom Waters confined to The Fletcher Memorial Home, a madhouse for the crazed and powerful, alongside history's worst dictators.
Musically, there are some genuine highlights. The Hero's Return is a deeply moving and gentle paeon to the fallen. Kamen's piano work and Raphael Ravenscroft's sax on The Gunner's Dream eloquently bring Waters poem to the corner of a foreign field to sad and bitter life. In the same vein, Southampton Dock was refreshingly bought to life live in the Waters comeback live tour. Deeply moving and poetical, I love this track, and it serves as an introduction to the title track, which is beautifully understated throughout, and features a good Gilmour solo and more lovely orchestration.
The Fletcher Memorial Home does bring Gilmour roaring into life with a trademark guitar burst one last time with his old sparring partner, if only, I suppose, to prove he could still do it. I think this is one of Waters' finest moments on record. The lyrics, ranting against these egotistical, mad, and inadequate leaders continues to have a profound effect on me, and the clever mix of subtle symphony and classic Floydian rock works extremely well.
The weakest track is the one that, musically, is out of kilter with all else, and an effort, I suppose, to bring some commercial success or attention to the album. Not Now John fails on almost every level. It's not good enough as a commercial piece of music, and the impact of the single was somewhat deadened when the lyrics had to be changed from "fuck all that" to "stuff all that".
The highlight of the album, to me, is the final track. Two Suns In The Sunset is a gorgeous piece of music, written to reflect the fear that Waters, and, indeed, many of us in 1983, had regarding a potential nuclear holocaust. It is easy to forget just how much this issue was alive at the time. The Labour Party fought a large part of their election campaign on nuclear disarmament, and Thatcher & Reagan were all for "bashing the commies". The acoustic guitar work is superb, at last the drums come to life on the album, Brown contributes some great organ work, an excellent sax solo, and these combined with genuinely frightening sound effects when "she blows", create a very memorable track.
This is not the album you put on for a good old knees up at a party. It is not the sort of album that you put on in order to uplift your spirits. What it is, though, is a deeply thoughtful and moving testimony to one man's long dead father, other fallen heroes, the question as to what exactly they had fought for when all was falling apart in the modern world anyway, and the sheer and utter waste of it all.
An excellent album and one that really deserves a thorough re-evaluation.
It is 1983. Prog is supposedly as dead as the proverbial doornail. And yet, there were all those stories in Sounds music paper about these new bands, who liked dressing up a bit, played "proper" music, with commercial sensibilities, and liked, gasp, Genesis. In fact, they apparently sounded a bit like them.
It was all a bit too much for us slightly nerdy types who continued to express our opinion that Floyd could play, and that New Romanticism was, basically, a pile of crap. It didn't get us laid very often, of course, but, hey, that's the price you pay!
So, a visit to the local record shop (when you had one in each town) in 1983 was a bit of a treat when presented with the debuts of the two “neo” giants, Marillion with Script....and this incredible work from IQ, still, in my opinion, the band who have stayed perhaps the closest to their musical roots over the years.
Founded by guitarist Mike Holmes, this collective could certainly play, and the opening track, The Last Human Gateway, was a stunning statement of intent, coming in at just short of twenty minutes, featuring the most delicate and angsty English vocals from Peter Nicholls since, well, a certain Mr Gabriel. Featuring flute, swirling keyboards, complex guitar and rhythm section, in places very much Yes driven, this was almost revelatory at the time, and, whilst it is fair to say that the production nowadays sounds rather weedy and light, it still stands up remarkably well as a piece of music.
It is, perhaps, unfair to single out any member of this collective, but this album was the start of a personal musical love affair with Martin Orford that lasts to this day, and I very much hope we have not heard the last of him as a performing artist on a full-time basis, for his work here is simply stunning. And as for those who thought that prog rockers were just a bunch of po-faced nerds, his wonderful piano solo piece on the hilariously named My Baby Treats Me Right Cos I'm a Hard Loving Man All Night Long is moving and classically driven. I would love to know just how the title came about!
Some of it, of course, now sounds pretty dated, particularly the "by numbers" Awake and Nervous, but I still get a great deal of pleasure in listening to the vinyl copy closer, The Enemy Smacks, with its delicate guitar work, delicious time signatures, dark organs, very introspective lyrics, vocals which still have me at times checking to see whether Hamill guested, and, well, confirmation to us at this exciting time that the prog "revival" was not to be a short lived experience.
This is an important album in prog rock history. Whilst outsold by its better-known peer Script, a situation which would continue and widen of course, this album spawned a fanatical fan base which has stayed loyal ever since, and I am happy to count myself amongst that number.
An excellent and critical addition to any prog collection, falling just short of masterpiece. They saved those for later. In fact, they are still producing them.