Pink Floyd - Yes; Yes - No

A few days ago, I purchased both the new Pink Floyd cd The Endless River as well as the most recent offering from Yes: Heaven & Earth.  Upon making those purchases, I had some commute time.  Therefore, driving around the city, I put the Pink Floyd cd in.

My heart leapt.  

It has been 20 years since Pink Floyd released any studio material and there is always the fear that the 'new' release will fall flat due to the growing and perhaps unmerited expectations of the fans.  As Phil Collins once said of Genesis, "There is no reason to expect the next album to sound like the last one."  Eddie Van Halen echoed that comment by expressing in an interview that fans had the old albums and if they wanted to hear the old stuff, they could simply pull them off the shelves.

I tried not to have any expectations - I don't know that that is actually possible - and put the cd in with as open ears as I could.

And I found that, even in the 5:00 traffic, I was transported through a variety of emotions, memories, and moods.  From the outset, I found that the cd, which is over 95% music, echoed so many of the motifs Pink Floyd has used throughout its career I couldn't help but thinking of other albums.  From guitar notes that sounded like 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond', Richard Wright pieces that echoed the soundscapes of Meddle and 'The Great Gig in the Sky', to hearing fragments that were clearly pieces of what would become 'Keep Talking' that I found it to be a mesmerizing musical retrospective while still being fresh.  

In some ways I found the cd to be a tribute to the late Richard Wright - he is featured prominently throughout.  That isn't a bad thing.  It also seemed to me that The Endless River was part of an unofficial trilogy: beginning with Pink Floyd's last album The Division Bell continuing with David Gilmour's album On an Island (perhaps including David Gilmour's cd Live in Gdansk would make it a tetralogy), The Endless River rounds out the journey that began 20 years ago.

I will say that the new cd wasn't anything like The Final Cut to be sure, but it did certainly pay homage to every iteration of the band.  The final song, 'Louder Than Words' starts off feeling a bit out of place and perhaps dated, but then the lyrics and music pull you back into the endless river that is Pink Floyd at its best.

I spoke with a fan in South Carolina some nights ago who said "It is clearly a farewell cd."  It wasn't a disparaging remark.  After hearing the cd for myself, I think I know what she meant.  If it actually is the final Pink Floyd album, they did a magnificent job of journeying through their past into the present and on down the endless river.

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As I said, I bought the new Pink Floyd.  I also bought the most recent Yes cd, Heaven & Earth.  

Several months ago, I wrote a review on the previous Yes cd Fly From Here (check out my archived articles to read it).  That was a good showing for Yes.  

Heaven & Earth is not.

Let me begin with the stunner.  The new lead singer, and I will say that I am a bit disappointed here.  Yes - until their Fly From Here album has only had two lead singers (Trevor Rabin might be a third, but I think of him more as the Steve Howe replacement, not Jon Anderson's replacement), but within the last three albums there have been three lead singers.  It is in keeping with the revolving door roster of Yes, but it signals an uncertainty, I fear, with regards to direction.  

Anyway, the new lead singer Jon Davison sounds like Jon Anderson.  Remarkably so.  He kind of looks like a blend of the 70's Anderson and Geddy Lee.  The sound of his voice made me check the insert just to make sure I hadn't misunderstood the word that Anderson wasn't on this one.

That was the stunning and remarkable piece.

Then the music hit, and I found it fell very, very short of what I had hoped to hear from Yes.

I recognize the whole 'expectations' thing that I mentioned earlier.  I didn't have any expectations, but I did hope that it would be a good album and possibly a surprise the way Fly From Here was.  

I found that it wasn't.  

What I did think it sounded like were the bonus tracks from the re-release of Drama - the songs that Anderson had recorded with Yes before he took his hiatus.  Those songs just never get going.  The new Yes sounds very much like those tracks.

Perhaps it was in listening to the cd after being so overwhelmed by Pink Floyd's new one that made this one seem to be such a pale offering from a stalwart band.  I don't know, but I fear it might be a signal that Yes has had its day.  

Perhaps not.  They do tend to surprise.  And perhaps with Jon Davison we might see the slow transfusion of new life into an old band and maybe Yes will have a few more decades in them if they retire and replace themselves with care and dedication to the music and musical ideas that made them one of my favorites over the years.