Author: Peter Podbrežnik
Artist: Yes
Label: Frontiers Records
Released: 2011
Length: 47:28
Rating: 2.5/5
“Fly From Here”, the first Yes album in almost ten years, which is how long it’s been since its predecessor “Magnification” (2001), and their twenty-first overall, could easily walk away with the grand prize for the most controversial prog rock album of the past decade, no contest. The backstory alone teeters on the edge of Spinal Tap-level absurdity, so it’s worth getting acquainted with it before you hit play. Over the past three years, certain things in the Yes camp have changed dramatically, and sadly not for the better.
Jon Anderson, the charismatic singer and lyricist, recognized for decades as the definitive voice of Yes and, alongside bassist Chris Squire, the only original member of the legendary prog rock band formed in 1968, ends up in the hospital with serious breathing problems right before the 2008 tour kicks off. His longtime buddies, drummer extraordinaire Alan White included, couldn’t have cared less about his health, not even enough to pick up the phone once, and their patience runs out. So they pick a new singer: Canadian Benoit David, a member of the Yes tribute band Close to the Edge and the prog rock outfit Mystery. He’s a carbon copy of Anderson twenty years younger, but without his vocal range, without pulling off the falsetto, and of course without Jon’s charisma. Spiteful types who don’t have much in common with real Yes fans would add: also without his knack for tireless new-age preaching in the lyrics.
Somewhat before this controversial episode, the legendary keyboardist Rick Wakeman quit Yes for health reasons. He was the only member who proved to be Anderson’s true friend during the hospital recovery, and the two still work together. His departure of course wasn’t as shocking as Anderson’s dismissal, since he’d left the band several times during his turbulent career and then come back. Still, the legendary virtuoso had always been the most beloved member of Yes among longtime followers, and with his keyboard showmanship, dazzling virtuosity, his sheer presence and trademark humor, he was the main draw for the crowds.
For the tour with the new singer he’s replaced by his son Oliver Wakeman. Right before the recording of “Fly From Here” kicks off, Oliver is replaced, against his own wishes, by Geoff Downes, longtime Asia keyboardist and a returnee to the band he last worked with successfully thirty years ago, on the tour for the cult album “Drama” (which will come up several more times in this review). Downes was brought into the band by guitar maestro Steve Howe, his brother-in-arms in Asia.
The few supporters of the new Yes will point out, in defense of new singer David, that the situation is quite similar to the one around “Drama”, when Anderson was replaced for two years by Trevor Horn (ex-The Buggles), who will also come up several more times in this review. David did his job on the album decently enough, as expected, and is personally not to blame at all for the resulting mess, since he was merely a pawn in Squire’s egotistical machinations.
The difference from back then is obvious: Anderson left the band voluntarily, rather than being forcibly fired, and the new lineup wasn’t aggressively promoted with a massive tour ahead of the album’s release or weighed down by mutual grudges. Everyone knew back then it was just a temporary experiment. Anderson came back to the band within a year, and “Drama”, the only album with Horn, who ironically produced “Fly From Here”, wrote most of its (better) material and sang the backing vocals, has deservedly earned cult status thanks to its distinctiveness and overall quality.
“Fly From Here” is a whole different story compared to “Drama”, even though it tries its damnedest to look and sound like its sequel. Yes give it everything they’ve got to revive the retro sound and complexity of their best era, but they don’t pull it off at all, and Horn’s retro, plastic production, with which he wanted to drag the band back to the turn of the seventies and eighties, doesn’t help. Most of the songs on the album were written by Horn and Downes as far back as the early eighties, around the “Drama” sessions, so Squire, Howe and White didn’t exactly break a sweat as composers this time. It raises a serious question whether the album even deserves the Yes logo, given that Horn and Downes wrote more than half of the compositions on it.
The most important question, the one that had most fans baffled before release, was of course whether the new incarnation of the band had justified its exclusive claim to the Yes name with “Fly From Here”. The answer could be both yes and no. Yes without Anderson are a poor substitute, at best a temporary experiment, so the first problem pops up right with the vocals. The new singer David, ironically, sounds like a hybrid of Anderson and the aforementioned Trevor Horn throughout the entire album. The second problem is Downes’s keyboards. Geoff is an outstanding keyboardist, but his approach, which fits art rock and AOR bands like Asia perfectly, doesn’t mesh as well with the more complex, fusion-flavored sonic vocabulary of bands like Yes. On that score, Wakeman’s layering and feel for fusion are sorely missed.
The brightest spots, as expected, are Squire with his still innovative and melodic Rickenbacker bass playing, and his misanthropic buddy Howe, who, despite looking more like a dried apple slice with every passing year, doesn’t let up in his devotion to the guitar tradition of the Appalachian Mountains. It’s precisely the perfectly synced and superbly executed integrity of their instruments that keeps the album from coming off as a total grotesque or a pure Yes tribute experiment.
The ironies just keep coming, though. In the past Yes were famed as masters of long, 10-plus-minute complex epics, and now they’ve become most convincing on shorter, rhythmically less demanding pieces that border on pop rock. The best track on the album is thus the opening six-minute, ultra-melodic “We Can Fly”, with its hypnotic chorus and wake-up-call energy, a perfect Horn and Downes ‘child’ originally created as a demo back in 1981 and intended for the second Buggles album “Adventures in Modern Recording” (1981). It’s also the only piece on the album where you really feel successful chemistry between the band members and where the new Yes sound like a cohesive band with everyone’s heart in it. The song works great on its own too, as a single. At the same time it’s a key part of the 25-minute suite “Fly From Here”, which they most likely, fearing a total commercial flop, chopped up into several shorter interlinked songs. Despite the sheer scale, there’s no cohesion to be felt between the suite’s individual parts. It’s a bundle of average art/pop-rock-leaning songs with the occasional prog flash and a solo flight here and there.
The solid, melodramatic-nostalgic “Sad Night at the Airfield”, crowned with Howe’s pastoral guitar melody and an outstanding steel pedal solo, is likewise a fruit of Horn and Downes’s collaboration in the early eighties. The ethereal chorus is a neat one and blends nicely with Downes’s symphonic arrangements and Howe’s steel pedal magic. Sadly, the album gets less interesting from one composition to the next, and after a promising start it slides into gray mediocrity until it finally sinks completely. “Madman at the Screens” is yet another pure Horn brainchild that, both in mood and rhythm, more than obviously recalls the “Drama” track “I’m a Camera”. A chronic lack of innovation is a nasty thing, especially when you end up copying yourself. The funk-spiced “Bumpy Ride”, which also belongs in the ‘heard it before’ pile and sounds so goofy it could’ve been written for some cartoon, is a chance for Howe’s electric guitar noodling and Squire’s Rickenbacker shenanigans in between, which, compared to most of the rest of the album, isn’t even that bad.
The rest of the album is far less inspired than the opening suite, which is not destined to stand alongside the epic suites of their past. “The Man You Always Wanted Me to Be” is a thoroughly average ballad-ish number with an acoustic guitar melody where Anderson’s vocal contribution is sorely missed, since Squire, always a fine backing vocalist, sounds utterly bored on lead, while the song never takes off after its initial promise. The repetitive “Life On a Film Set” is yet another average mid-tempo piece with a heavy Horn compositional stamp, plastic production and a completely absurd lyric. Yes just aren’t The Buggles.
Two Howe creations follow, promising a refresh but not living up to expectations. The first, the acoustic-leaning “Hour of Need”, has a jaunty melody and playful harmonies, while “Solitaire” is a pleasant listen but, on the other hand, a totally forgettable solo guitar instrumental that’s merely a pale approximation of the classics “Clap” and “Mood For a Day”. The closing “Into the Storm”, despite its ambitious bent, is one of the dullest and most half-baked things they’ve made in the last twenty years, and it sounds more like something suited at best to Squire’s side project Conspiracy than to Yes.
Even though Squire (for now) refuses to face the truth, the real Yes always were and remained the product of a successful partnership between him and Anderson. Aside from the two of them, every other member of the band is replaceable. Whenever this partnership falls apart, the band hits rough times. The last time, in 1981, it nearly ended in a breakup. Luckily, nothing so dramatic is expected this time, since Squire has already admitted he’s ready to work with Jon again, but only after the tour for the new album is over. On the other side too, despite all the twists and turns, there’s no bad blood, so a reunion is entirely realistic.
“Fly From Here”, all things considered and taking the age of the lineup’s main members into account, isn’t a total miss after all, even though in its sonic mission it tries far too obviously to be “Drama-Part 2”. Compared to the band’s golden era it’s of course a below-average product from a legendary band that, partly thanks to Horn’s unfortunate, plastic production, let time run it over a little. Instead of trying to create something new and innovative with the new singer, they succumbed to creative uninspiredness and certain sonic clichés of the past, because they were determined to prove they can create the traditional Yes sound without Anderson. Sadly, the years caught up with them. In any case, “Fly From Here” wasn’t worth the ruined reputation and the end of the successful partnership of the legendary Anderson-Squire duo, which in the seventies was key to the success of albums like “Close to the Edge, “Tales from Topographic Oceans” “Relayer” and “Going for the One”, timeless masterpieces next to which the latest Yes release is just a sterile shadow of former greatness. Jon Anderson, come back soon.
Lineup
Chris Squire – bass guitar, backing vocals, lead vocals on “The Man You Always Wanted Me to Be”
Steve Howe – guitar, backing vocals
Alan White – drums
Geoff Downes – keyboards
Benǫt David Рlead vocals
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Oliver Wakeman – additional keyboards on “We Can Fly”, “We Can Fly (Reprise)” and “Hour of Need”
Trevor Horn – backing vocals, additional keyboards
LuÃs Jardim – percussion
Gerard Johnson – piano on “The Man You Always Wanted Me to Be”
Production
Trevor Horn
Track list
1. Fly From Here – Overture (1:53)
2. Fly From Here – Pt I – We Can Fly (6:00)
3. Fly From Here – Pt II – Sad Night At The Airfield (6:41)
4. Fly From Here – Pt III – Madman At The Screens (5:16)
5. Fly From Here – Pt IV – Bumpy Ride (2:15)
6. Fly From Here – Pt V – We Can Fly (reprise) (1:44)
7. The Man You Always Wanted Me To Be (5:07)
8. Life On A Film Set (5:01)
9. Hour Of Need (3:07)
10. Solitaire (3:30)
11. Into The Storm (6:54)
