True by Jon Anderson featuring The Band Geeks

Take a deep breath. It's a new Jon Anderson album.

My mate James (hi James!) really has a problem with Jon Anderson's lyrics, especially when he starts banging on about fairies and universal peace. I share his misgivings - his lyrics really can be insufferably twee at times. And because this is a Jon Anderson album, not a Yes album, there is clearly no-one there to reign in those tendencies. Having said that, if you can get over it, this sounds more like Yes than anything I've heard in the last thirty years.

Anderson got involved with the Band Geeks when he heard a demo of 'Heart of the Sunrise' - which I hardly need remind you is from the classic 1971 Yes album Fragile. He thought the Band Geeks played like 1970s Yes and asked them to tour with him.

I don't love everything Yes did in the 1970s. Parts of Tales from Topographic Oceans are self-indulgent nonsense. Some of Tormato is excruciatingly bad, especially what I call the effing whale song, which is about as unsubtle a message song as you will ever find. But at their best, they were utterly sublime. Pretty much all of Going for the One, especially Awaken and Wonderous Stories. The aforementioned Heart of the Sunrise and the other 'proper' songs from Fragile. So is sounding like Yes from the 1970s a good thing?

Oh yes. This album is flawed, but it's glorious. True Messenger's opening acoustic guitar riff turns into a masterfully handled complex arrangement, switching time signatures and tempos, bringing in a wealth of musical ideas. It absolutely fizzes with joyful musicianship. I barely even noticed the hippy nonsense lyrics.

Shine On has a worryingly optimistic opening, but when the bass kicks in we know exactly where we are. That bass riff could have been written by Chris Squire. An excellent track.

Moving on a few tracks, Make It Right has an intro that is straight into Awaken territory. A beautiful and complex acoustic guitar part, over which Anderson's vocals soar.

As of 2024, Jon Anderson is 80. His voice is completely undiminished, incredibly. I've criticised his vocals many times - sometimes he is just out of tune, frankly - but here they sound terrific.

In summary, I would highly recommend this album. It's just great.

Reasons to listen:

  • You love classic Yes
Reasons not to listen:
  • You really can't get over the universal love and peace hippy nonsense vibe

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tormato By Yes

I decided to listen to this album with an open mind, because I'll be honest I've always disliked it. I've listened to it twice this morning and I'll try to be objective. In doing the research for this (yes! I do research!) I discovered that Eddy Orford left the project early on. And it sounds to me, frankly, like this album lacks anyone who knows what they are doing from a production side. On the first track, Future Times/Rejoice, the guitar, keyboard and vocal are all fighting each other for space in the mix, with the result that it sounds a complete mess. Yes did a similar thing with Going For The One, which is one of the most sonically busy songs I've ever heard, but there it works; here it doesn't. Steve Howe's guitar sounds like he's putting it through a bargain basement amp, Wakeman's keyboard sounds like a cheap Casio and Anderson's voice sounds thin and out of tune at times. In fact, the contrast with the Going For The One album couldn...
Read more

Bigger On The Inside By Rachel Flowers

Oh my goodness I am listening to something amazing. I have just discovered, through a random association on Amazon Music (I was listening to Jadis), the incredible Rachel Flowers, an American multi-instrumentalist and composer. There's an excellent mini-bio on IMDb which I've linked below. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5231044/bio/ Composer is important, because these songs are not thrown together in five minutes. You can hear the thought and craft that went into them. On top of that, she's a great singer. And her lyrics are excellent! How do I describe her music? Well, it's definitely progressive rock. Extended themes. Three of the songs are longer than 10 minutes and the album clocks in at 67 minutes. The melodies, though, are out of this world. There's an American twist to some of them which at times reminds me of TV theme tunes, but in a good way. Kind of progressive rock and soft jazz. Track 7, for example, "The Darkness" has a sublime refrain which bui...
Read more

SMPT:e by Transatlantic

My mate James is the world's biggest progger. He has so many prog CDs he had to reinforce the floor of his flat. He once had a record player which was so expensive it took a team of four people to come in and install it. Some of these things might be true. Anyway, James asked me to review a Transatlantic album, so here we are. SMPT:e is the first album by  the prog supergroup which features Neal Morse (once of Spock's Beard), Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater), Pete Trewavas (Marillion) and Roine Stolt (the Flower Kings). The style is very much classic neo-prog. It's almost a case study in how to make a prog album. Long songs, tick. Odd time signatures, tick. Big sound, tick. And so on. This is very much an album which consolidates the progressive rock sound rather than extends it. The first track, for example. It's 31 minutes long. It starts with a short atmospheric scene-setter before going into a high-tempo instrumental section and from there into more of a song section. Y...
Read more