AR: Tales From Topographic Oceans

Yes - Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973)

Oh, what the hell. Surely an album this EPIC deserves the full LP cover, no?

Ah, that's more like it. When I read that Avatar's iconic fluorescent fern-world reminded reviewers of "some weird Yes album cover," this is the image that instantly came to mind. Because if you're talking overblown, extravagant productions with lots of flash and spectacle, loads of technical genius but a thoroughly questionable if not idiotic storyline, you are clearly talking about ... wait, lost my train of thought there. Tales From Topographic Oceans was, despite SA radio station KZEP's best attempts to get me to satisfiedly turn my head each day, my first introduction to Yes, one of the Nyet-Dad's favorite '70s rock bands. I clearly remember the worn psychedelic album cover sitting in our living room; I even better remember the one-song-per-twenty-minute-album-side double LP format and the liner notes that contained all kinds of Eastern mystic / nature-worship weirdness, incomprehensible to me then and no better after undergraduate courses in the exact topic. Oh, and natch, I remember "What happened / to the song / we once knew so well?" and "We must have waited all our lives for this...," because, well, how could you not. It was a prominent album from the collection, one of which at least side one made it into the rotation quite often, and the memories of mysterious music* certainly line up well with that album cover.

* - The music also reminds me of Beluga Whales, which I suspect has something to do with childhood season passes to San Antonio Sea World and the general spaced out soundtrack to the nighttime cetacean performances. Proust had his madeleines, I've got Beluga Whales. One point, Nyet.

TfTO is, arguably, THE prog album, because while it most certainly contains moments of brilliance, its meandering noodly tunes with obtuse lyrics scream of an indulgence that even hardcore Yes fans tend to acknowledge. Its expanse, technicality and detached intellectualism are about as far from punk on the rock spectrum as one can get, so it's an extreme example of that general charge at '70s progressive rock. I.e. it's everything the haters hate. The instrumentation is all shimmery guitars, organs, slide-wheel-excess synthesizers, falsetto voices and big echoing chambers; I've always thought the general vibe while evoking the bizarre space fantasy world that adorns the cover, is something like futuristic laser baroque of the distant past. (You'll note that listening will tend to cause your writing to be riddled with equally obtuse constructions). There's a crushing sense that the band and the album can't figure out what the hey they're up to - even with a backbone of a concept about some Eastern mystic scriptures regarding Truth, Culture, Knowledge and Freedom - and the result is some wowser over-the-top-colossal noodling. And that, friends, is an indictment coming from a Phish guy. What makes the album suffer is the pretense that the clinical improv has some kind of actual message to deliver that amounts to more than its ever-shifting, disconnected runs and textures. Were it just improv that stuck to its own confines, that would be one thing, but that it claims to spit nirvana from between the notes makes the enterprise feel a tad gratuitous.

On the first five listens, anyways. What is sort of endearing and infuriating about the double-discer is that the fleeting engaging moments that are peppered throughout the disc - if you let them sink in enough, the rest of the wandering works in service of these anchor-points. Most reviews stop at my above paragraph with a sort of "WTF is this?" take, but if you forgive the excess and can be patient for the rare moments - or if you, say, heard this album several times during your formative years and can't help it now - there are some rewards peppered about the disc. I suppose what I'm getting at is that while I would fully forgive anyone who balked at this album, I almost can't help but leave it playing. Is the third track, "The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun)," a good one? No! But it has that lovely folk melody acoustic section at the end. And so I will generally sit there for 20 minutes just to hear it. Huh?

And that goes about two thousand fold for the opening track / side, the 20 minute "The Revealing Science Of God (Dance Of The Dawn)." That has gotten to the point where as ridiculous as the chanting intro is, I actually do get excited by the bombastic synth riffs. It's become a great song, in my head anyways - there's no use to trying to describe it, as again, these tunes are shifty beasts that refuse to occupy any particular space (other than perhaps, as mentioned, a large salt water aquarium). But trust that there are tons of interesting passages in here, and the atmospherics are like Boston weather - if you don't like it, just wait thirty seconds. (That won't change the lyrics, though; they're still going to be about not raping trees. Try to ignore that). This one also has two serious earworm lyrical moments I mentioned above.

So I'm going to make an odd rec here - if you are into prog at all, this is probably an important document to own as it clearly demonstrates what happens when Yes takes things way too far - it mayhaps should have been titled Well Past the Edge*. Ha, a Yes joke. The opening track is a superb Yes gem, despite its awful lyrics, and the rest is listenable enough, particularly for the few good runs. Make no mistake, though - the second disc of this album should not be described as "good," and there are way better Yes albums to get into first. So this is sort of a qualified qualified rec, mainly because I just can't honestly not recommend TfTO - for all its preposterous qualities, I like it too much for its childhood associations; its grandiosity is encoded in me and surely has shaped a lot of my musical inclinations. I gotta admit when I like a bad album (if I still had it, I would probably have to rec (solid) Milli Vanilli), so here I am, doing so. Seriously, though, Fragile, Close to the Edge, or The Yes Album are all better places to start.

* - It's like when Joey walked really far away from the U2 stage. The Edge was a dot to him. Wokka wokka.

Status: Recommended (solid) (sorta)
Nyet's Fave: "The Revealing Science Of God (Dance Of The Dawn)"*

* - No, I will not put two songs even if it is a double LP. One twenty minute behemoth is enough.