Album Review- Yes: Time and a Word

Album: Time and a Word
Year: 1970
The Lineup:
Jon Anderson- Vocals
Peter Banks- Guitar
Bill Bruford- Drums
Tony Kaye- Keyboards
Chris Squire- Bass

Have I Heard It Before: Except for the title track, no, though with a caveat: A few songs from this album appear on “The Word Is Live”, meaning I’ve technically heard them, but I couldn’t remember any of them on listening to their studio versions here for the first time.

Love them or hate them, one thing that can’t be denied about Yes is that they’re unafraid to swing big in the service of what they’re going for. It’s a high-risk, high-reward proposition, and when they swing and connect, it’s brilliant.

When they swing and miss, though…look out. In that case, Yes wind up looking like one of those baseball cartoons where the guy swings and misses so hard that the bat, and his arms, wrap around his body (Or the variant where he tornados himself into the ground).

Time and a Word is Yes’s first truly big swing, and the end result…well, remember how I wrote that most Yes fans will tell you to start with The Yes Album, the one after Time and a Word? There’s a reason.

This isn’t to say that the album is wholly without merit. As with the first album, there are two cover songs–“No Opportunity Required, No Experience Needed” by Richie Valens, and Buffalo Springfield’s “Everydays”. As with “Every Little Thing” from the first album, “No Opportunity…” is one of the best things on this album, being a good deal faster and more upbeat than the original. As for “Everydays”, the first two and a half minutes (Like “Every Little Thing”, Yes roughly double the length of the original song) evoke a smoky jazz lounge, which isn’t a bad thing, even if it’s not the first image that jumps to mind when you hear “Yes”.

Yes’s love of stereo effects is also evident on pretty much every song on the album, with instruments either alternating from ear-to-ear (As with the backing instrumentation on “No Opportunity…”), or simply being hard-panned to one side of the other. It’s an album that should be experienced with a decent pair of headphones to get the full effect.

Like the first album, there are signs of where they would end up. The ending of “Then”, with its sparse instrumentation and quiet vocals, seems to be an embryonic form of the type of interlude they would perfect with “I Get Up, I Get Down” from Close to the Edge.

This time around, Yes thought a good idea for adding more flavor to their songs would be incorporating an orchestra. This is the main flaw of the album–the enthusiasm and ambition behind this outweighed their ability to actually write compositions for it. It’s not a total flop–in “Then”, the orchestral accents between vocal lines give the track a James Bond feel, and as a whole tends to work when it’s in the background–but it’s jarring when in the foreground, taking you out of the music rather than adding anything to it. I can see people in 1970 listening to “No Opportunity…” for the first time, thinking “Sweet, another album of psychedelic-influenced rock!”, then hearing the orchestra come in and wondering “What the hell is going on?” It wouldn’t be the last time a Yes album would raise that question.

Sometimes to move forward, you have a take a step back. Time and a Word is a step back from the first album. But it’s less an outright bad album than a frustrating one. A lot of it either evokes things they would later do better–the interlude of “Everydays” calls to mind the barely-contained anarchy of “The Solid Time of Change” but less-developed, besides the already-mentioned “Then” reminding me of another portion of “Close to the Edge”–or reminds me of things from the first album–“Sweet Dreams” is a not-as-good version of “Looking Around”, while the tempo of “Astral Traveler” answers the question of “What if Yes decided to put lyrics to that mid-tempo instrumental section of ‘Harold Land’ before the actual vocals start?” And given that, I would rather listen to those instead.

You can listen to the entire album on Youtube here.

-EE