Yes! Yes!

One of the items I received for Christmas was the Yes Studio Albums 1969-1987 Box Set. While I would say my musical taste was more-or-less fully-formed by the time I really “discovered” Yes in college, I do like a lot of the Yes that I’ve heard, and they were an important, if indirect, influence on my bass playing via Rush’s Geddy Lee being heavily influenced by Chris Squire of Yes.

So I figure this will be a great way to A. Get into the Yes albums I haven’t heard, and B. Find some time to sneak in some writing as well. Periodically, I’ll be writing up a kind of album review of each of the albums. I haven’t decided the schedule for this yet, but I figure with twelve albums, one for each month of 2016 seems like a good target to aim for.

First though, a little bit about the set itself. The set contains 13 CDs spanning 12 albums (Tales From Topographic Oceans is a double album), from 1969’s self-titled debut through 1987’s Big Generator. These are included in sleeves that contain miniature versions of the original album artwork. Also included are the bonus tracks included on the remasters of the albums Rhino Records did in the early 2000s–this actually marks the first time the Big Generator bonus tracks are available in the US. Unfortunately, the cool expanded retrospective liner notes from those remasters didn’t make the jump to this set. The box artwork is by Roger Dean, the artist most associated with Yes, and there’s also a small poster included with the set with art by Roger.

Given that I already have about half the albums in the set (The ones I owned prior to this: Fragile, Close to the Edge, Tales From Topographic Oceans, Going For the One, and Drama), I think noting whether or not I’m listening to the album for the first time would be a good idea. I’ll also note if there are any particular bonus tracks that catch my ear (I’m a sucker for behind-the-scenes anything, and a lot of the bonus tracks fall into that early version/studio walkthrough/rehearsal kind of space), but I won’t factor them into the reviews of the albums themselves.

So this should be fun!

-EE