Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Yes
Label: Atlantic Records
Released: 1980
Length: 36:56
Rating: 3.5/5
After a devastating tour of Great Britain in 1980, Yes fell apart. People just didn’t accept Trevor Horn as the band’s new singer, who got the most thankless spot in the group. He had to replace the offended Jon Anderson, who had walked out of Yes with Wakeman, claiming that none of the other members wanted to listen to his and Wakeman’s ideas for writing music anymore. The material from the ‘Paris Sessions’ (1979) showed just how fed up the golden-lineup guys were with each other. On this re-release, alongside the other bonus tracks, there are also four from the ‘Paris Sessions’, and they’re utterly dismal and unoriginal. During the recording in Paris the band split into two camps and wrote completely separately. Wakeman and Anderson kept their material apart from the trio of Howe, Squire and White, who cooked up their brainwaves together. The split was inevitable.
So keyboardist Geoffrey Downes (today the leader of Asia) and singer Trevor Horn jumped in to rescue the “wounded egos of three Yes castaways”. The two had previously scored a huge commercial hit as the duo The Buggles with the song Video Killed The Radio Star. Both were totally “plugged into” the mainstream scene of the day. How closely the two new recruits were tuned in to the emerging new wave pop sound showed in Yes’s new sonic look too.
With the new album, Yes remained an avant-garde band, working new modern sounds into rock music. The funny thing about all this is the masochistic wankery of the press and the younger bands of the time, claiming Yes were dinosaurs who had outlived their day. It came across as if they weren’t allowed to flirt with anything new, even though it was Yes who, with the ‘Tormato’ sound, showed what the future looked like, and new wave bands (The Police, for instance) followed. Similar “insults” from the British press were flying at the time at another seventies giant that had just reunited, King Crimson, with the album “Discipline” (1981).Okay, let’s get back to Yes! The magic with Anderson was gone, and so were the long solo passages between guitar and keyboards. The otherwise excellent Geoff Downes stepped in on keys as the guy who basically looks after the fullness and depth of the sound. While Wakeman clearly retreated into soloing, Downes uses his arrangements to keep the songs tight and build an extraordinary atmosphere. At this point the music lost complexity but gained rock punch. And this is where Howe got completely free rein.
So on the “wakemanless” ‘Drama’ album, Steve breathed with full lungs again. He dropped the experimenting with new sounds and tuned his instruments in proper rocker fashion once more. The guitar again carries Howe’s classic sound in the solos. The record opens with a shock! With a “metalized” intro to Machine Messiah, which could easily have been renamed Drama after the album’s title. Yes patched up Anderson’s deficit by dressing Horn’s naturally high-ringing vocals in Steve’s and Chris’s backing vocal harmonies. That got them effectively close to what they’d made with Anderson. The album has excellent modern production for its time, the kind that upcoming pop rock mainstream stars like Human League and Talking Heads drew from. Crystal-clear sound with a pronounced beat. ‘Drama’ is mostly overlooked because Anderson doesn’t sing on it, and the memory of it has nearly vanished because Anderson doesn’t want to sing these songs live anymore. That’s why White and Sqiure usually wedge the main motif of Tempus Fugit into their regular live number at concerts called Whitefish. Anyway, ‘Drama’ is an excellent album that undoubtedly saved Yes’s skin. The fantastic ten-and-a-half-minute dynamic Machine Messiah is a song that combines typical Yes prog moves with a true rocker approach of gritty guitar, which as always offers a colorful palette of transitional embellishments.
Into The Lens is one of those fantastic songs that has definitely been unjustly overlooked all the way to this day, with an excellent guitar arrangement, especially in the chorus, which recalls the tolling of the bell on judgment day. Into The Lens confirms once again the full genius of Steve Howe and his extraordinary feel for bringing a particular situation to life. The record has a melancholic tinge throughout, as if Yes were carrying unbearable pain this time. The short “filler” Man In A White Car is actually Gary Numan, the guy who had a massive solo hit in 1979 called Cars. Downes and Horn had already written that track for The Buggles, and The Buggles played it at their concerts in another version and under another title.
This remark is a bit thankless, but you can even pick up some The Police seasoning on the album (the guitar rhythm drive and the vocal parts in Tempus Fugit, for example). ‘Drama’ is a “relaxed” and “sharpened” rock album. It doesn’t have any special intellectual depth or hymns to the sun and everything else beyond the visible horizons (read: the poetry of the Anderson era), but it’s a splendid creation all the same. It’s tastefully listenable, perfect as the soundtrack to a lazy morning and sipping your morning coffee, with a few very convincing melancholic moments (Into The Lens, Run Through The Light), plus some “tantalizing” double faces (Machine Messiah, with its proto-metal opening riff). Not a drop of sugar on it! It’s a record where practically every track has “head and tail”, and that’s something for fans of 80s Yes who aren’t too keen on their 70s “droning on” – at least up to ‘The Ladder’ (1999), which hinted at what happened with “Magnification” (2001) – the “full circle” was completed (a stylistic reaffirmation of the seventies), a proper jumping-off point for diving into this corner of the Yes world. ‘Drama’ is a transitional album and a sort of precursor to what happened three years later. Still, this isn’t exactly an album Yes could be especially proud of. It kept the name alive in a pinch on a scene that was slowly being flooded by young synth pop rock bands, while the N.W.O.B.H.M. movement, with the forerunner of total “blitzkrieg” called Judas Priest, was slowly rising on the horizon.
Lineup
Trevor Horn – vocals, bass guitar on 5
Chris Squire – bass guitar, vocals and piano on 5
Geoff Downes – keyboards
Alan White – drums
Steve Howe – guitar
Production
Eddie Oford
Track list
1. Machine Messiah (10:27)
2. White Car (1:21)
3. Does It Really Happen? (6:34)
4. Into the Lens (8:31)
5. Run Through the Light (4:39)
6. Tempus Fugit (5:14)
