Music Monday (Heaven & Earth, Side 1)

Back in July of this past year I was so excited that Yes was going to release a new album. It was the first brand new release I would be able to cover with my blog here. I had read that Benoit David was out as lead singer and the new singer was going to be Jon Anderson Davison, from the band Glass Hammer. The rest of the band (Squier, Howe, White, Downes) was the same. That album was Heaven & Earth.

Roger Dean y'all!

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Heaven & Earth is the twenty-first studio album by the band. 

About the name of the album, guitarist Steve Howe stated, "In a way, the parallel of saying ‘Heaven And Earth’ is the same as saying good and bad, yin and yang, up and down, left and right. They’re two extremes, but I think the way Roger and I liked it was that in fact the Earth is a physical place where you can measure stuff and you can do quantum physics. But Heaven is an unknown place of no particular destination as far as anybody knows. And yet it doesn’t matter whether you’re totally tied up in a religious belief or whether you’re spiritual in a way. That doesn’t require religious commitment — it just requires awareness to the fact that there’s obviously something out there that we don’t know about. It sums up the dualistic quality of the known and the unknown and the more you look at the known the more you see that there’s even more unknown than you knew before." Umm yeah okay Steve.

Unlike the previous studio album Fly From Here, this album is made of new material only. For his first album with Yes, Davison was fully involved into the songwriting process. In fact, a lot of the album shows his meditative side quite a bit. Unfortunately for me, the whole thing just came off as too mellow. I just feel like something is missing. Nothing stands out. If you would have told me this was Starcastle I may have believed you. And that's not what I expect my Yes to be. Sometimes slapping a Roger Dean cover on it doesn't elevate the musical content.

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The Music

1) Believe Again - This really is a good song. Not too mellow but on the softer side for sure.

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2) The Game - Once again, not a bad song. But it follows a similar sounding one so sometimes it's hard for me to tell when the first song ends and this one begins.

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3) Step Beyond - This is only a snippet of the whole song (nothing else was on YouTube), and it is slightly misleading. The guitar part you hear only shows up once in the whole song (and feels forced in my book) while most of the rest is that keyboard loop you hear over and over. It's like they found the only interesting part on the whole album to put in the advertisement.

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4) To Ascend - And we go right back to mellow. At this point the album has almost put me to sleep. Also, there is an acoustic version of this as a bonus track on the Japanese release. Once again I ask, why?

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I love Yes, I really do. I am totally glad they are still putting out music too. I guess I could just accept the fact that the guys are just old, and maybe this is the best they can do now.

They do save themselves a bit on the flip side, but not by much. Look for the second half of this post coming soon.