Search - Yes :: Relayer

Yes continues to make suite music

Lawrance M. Bernabo | The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota | 02/27/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Along with "Tales from Topographic Oceans," the 1974 album "Relayer" constitutes the third stage in the career of Yes. The first was the early experimental stuff nobody remembers and the second stage was their glory years with "The Yes Album," "Fragile," and "Close to the Edge." The group was clearly moving in the direction of "suites" (i.e., single "songs" that took up an entire side of a record) and in this third stage they indulged in this approach to the extreme. "Relayer" had only three songs: "Gates of Delirum" on side 1, and "Sound Chaser" and "To Be Over" on side 2. These suites alternate between instrumental sections where guitarist Steve Howe, bass player Chris Squire, keyboardist Patrick Moraz, and drummer Alan White are given there opportunities to solo, and vocal and choral sections when singer Jon Anderson lapses into spirutal lyrics. On the one hand this is what they had been doing before, but now the sense of structure that made the early suites so great is pretty much missing. "Relayer" comes across more like a studio jam session, which will strike some Yes fans as being pretentious and others as a worthwhile musical exercise. For others as long as Roger Dean does the cover painting that is justification enough for picking up this album (at least you could use record covers as art; hard to do that with CDs). It all depends on what you think Yes's music was all about in the end."