Cat Stevens - Foreigner

Released - July 1973

Genre - Folk

Producer - Cat Stevens

Selected Personnel - Cat Stevens (Vocals/Guitar/Piano/Keyboards/Synthesiser/Bass); Jean Roussel (Keyboards); Phil Upchurch (Guitar); Paul Martinez (Bass); Herbie Flowers (Bass); Bernard Purdie (Drums/Percussion); Gerry Conway (Drums/Percussion)

Standout Track - Foreigner Suite

As I've mentioned in my last couple of reviews for Cat Stevens's stuff, the man had yet to have made a bad album since his first undeniable classic in the form of 1970's Mona Bone Jakon. But nor had he made an album since then that had really pushed himself as an artist and made any real effort to do anything different or new. As yet, that hadn't been to the outright detriment of any of his work - every subsequent release continued to be a masterful collection of simple, heartfelt and catchy folk music, but by the time of 1972's Catch Bull At Four it was clear that this formula couldn't continue indefinitely. For the first time since 1969's New Masters, Steven released an album that, while it had its timeless songs, was composed of more than a fair share of forgettable filler material. Not only that, it showed the glimmer of new ideas in some places, with Stevens introducing synthesisers into his musical arsenal, albeit with subtlety rather than great flair. One definitely feels from Catch Bull At Four that another album recorded with exactly the same team behind it and mining exactly the same acoustic folk-based veins of inspiration, it would inevitably have felt like Cat Stevens had run out of ideas. Stevens was aware of this as anybody in his audience may have been, and felt that he would have to resort to drastic measures to rescue any sense of creative inspiration.

So it is that we have Foreigner, without a doubt the most unusual and atypical album Stevens released, and also one of his finest. It's unmatched elsewhere in his discography in terms of ambition, and for the most part achieves that ambition admirably, regardless of the hostile critical reception it received from the less open-minded sectors of his audience. The first thing Stevens did was to shed the two most crucial figures behind his transformation into one of the most popular and accomplished singer-songwriters of the early 70s, producer Paul Samwell-Smith and guitarist Alun Davies. Both would return for his next album, but for Stevens Foreigner needed to be a scorched earth policy that cut him off from everything he felt overly comfortable with, including his choice of collaborators. The next move was to immerse himself in a musical world he had previously never paid much attention to - the world of what he had termed "black music" as a child. Rather than making music that owed a debt to the principally white world of folk and rock and roll, Stevens now turned his attention to R&B, gospel and blues, with even reggae and funk proving to be key influences on the new album's sound. Even the instrumentation was radically different - the majority of the songs, particularly the album's epic centrpiece, the "Foreigner Suite," were built around keyboards rather than Stevens's go-to musical tool, the acoustic guitar. He had started incorporating keyboards more widely on Catch Bull At Four, but on Foreigner they are at the heart of music, while the majority of the guitars present are electric rather than acoustic.

If there's one major innovation that really stands out about Foreigner, though, it's that aforementioned title suite. If ever there was a way for Stevens to throw down the gauntlet and defiantly state that he was trying to do something very different to the short acoustic ballads of his previous work, it was by building an R&B album around an eighteen-minute multi-part suite. While the likes of Bob Dylan had experimented in lengthy, rambling poetic epics previously, it was rare for something like a side-long suite to exist outside the realms of prog rock, and for a folk singer to turn his hand to it must have been quite a shock. That he achieves it so magnificently is even more of a surprise. The "Foreigner Suite" is nothing short of magnificent - its lyrics are actually some of the simplest and most unaffected in his discography, being effectively just a very tender and heartfelt love song, and it's perhaps a surprise that such a lengthy and complex piece of music isn't something that tackles a grander subject. But Stevens sets his declaration of love to a gloriously complex and rich backing that moves from one musical idea to another seamlessly, taking in a staggering range of musical influences and time signatures and styles. It starts with a brief excerpt from a very simple, piano-based ballad before segueing into a propulsive, upbeat R&B number ("I'm over to that sunnyside road,") replete with the gospel strains of the backing singers. Later still, the reggae twang of Phil Upchurch's guitar introduces a new mood and a lengthy instrumental jam before the return of the slow, portentous piano ballad that opened the song. The final minutes of the piece are given over to one of the most beautiful songs Stevens has ever written as a jaunty piano part and increasingly frenetic guitar bounces along to his jubilant cries of "Heaven must have programmed you." The chord sequence and melody of these final minutes, strangely enough, are almost identical to Coldplay's "Viva La Vida," to the extent that Stevens ended up joining Joe Satriani in filing a lawsuit against them for the song, both of them competing in claiming that their song was the inspiration.

It's a magnificent piece of music, startlingly new and alien and exciting to anyone familiar with Stevens's earlier work, and as rich in emotion as any song he'd written up to that point. But the spirit of experimentation and of musical diversity wasn't confined to that one sprawling epic - the short collection of songs on the second side are similarly fresh and exciting. "The Hurt," which ended up being the album's only minor hit despite being one of its less interesting tracks, is another upbeat R&B-style track in the vein of the second section of the "Foreigner Suite," while "How Many Times" feels closer in spirit to the older style of Cat Stevens ballad. There's a vague gospel-blues spirit to it, but essentially it just finds Stevens at his piano singing tenderly about lost love, and it's cosily familiar to the dieheard fan who would by this stage have perhaps felt very confused by how much their favourite artist had changed with his latest output. Just to remind that comforted listener that things are still being done on his terms rather than theirs, Stevens follows it up with "Later," which looks to the traditions of late-60s funk for its inspirations. With its infectious bass groove around a single chord and its muted guitar riff and bluesy piano, it's one of the coolest and most danceable songs Stevens ever wrote, and the most concise example on the record of why Stevens's apparent gamble to take inspiration from black music rather than white was inspired rather than risky. As the 70s wore on, more and more artists would come to experiment with black musical styles as traditional rock and roll grew increasingly tired, and here Stevens, along with figures like Paul Simon, finds himself at the vanguard of that tradition. Finally, "100 I Dream" is a perfectly enjoyable R&B-inflected closer that feels suitably uplifting but fails to create a truly compelling or memorable melody so suffers a little in comparison to the highs of what has already been achieved on the album up to that point.

Ultimately, it's perhaps inevitable that Foreigner would end up being a one-time diversion for Stevens - no doubt if this new style he immersed himself in became his de facto way of making music he would again have quickly burned himself out, maybe even faster than before given how unfamiliar he was with the musical styles he was moving into. Any commitment he may have had to making more albums in a similar style would no doubt have been dashed further by the aforementioned critical backlash to Foreigner - while it sold well, it wasn't received favourably by the music press of the time. Stevens responded not by sticking to his guns but by admitting defeat and reuniting with Samwell-Smith and Davies for his next album, a return to traditional folk songwriting. Still, the quality on that next album would feel reinvigorated and it would be far more consistent than the patchy Catch Bull At Four, so his work on this album certainly gave him back a sense of creative freedom and inspiration he had been lacking recently. That he managed to make a genuinely phenomenal and excitingly fresh album in the process is an added bonus we can all be grateful for.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Cat Stevens.

1. Foreigner Suite

2. The Hurt

3. How Many Times

4. Later

5. 100 I Dream

Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle

Released - September 1973

Genre - Rock

Producer - Mike Appel & Jim Cretecos

Selected Personnel - Bruce Springsteen (Vocals/Guitar/Harmonica/Mandolin/Percussion); Clarence Clemons (Saxophone); David Sancious (Piano/Organ/Keyboards); Danny Federici (Accordion/Piano/Organ); Garry Tallent (Bass); Vini Lopez (Drums)
Standout Track - Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)

Considering the extent to which he's become one of my latest musical heroes, I came to the Boss astoundingly late in my musical odyssey. Of course, being one of the ultimate icons of true rock & roll, he's a figure I've been aware of for years (in fact, if I trace it back, I think my very earliest awareness of him would be watching Fierce Creatures, the semi-sequel to A Fish Called Wanda, when I was about twelve, in which Kevin Kline tries to drive more customers into a failing zoo by claiming they own Bruce Springsteen's tortoise), but it took me a long time to find time to actually listen to his work, and be swept up by it. I think actually that my long-standing love of, and obsession with, Tom Waits, was a barrier for some time - I knew Springsteen had covered Waits's eternally beautiful ballad "Jersey Girl" and brought it to critical acclaim, and had read in several places that in many ways Waits was the West Coast's answer to Springsteen - a similar troubadour-type figure of a singer-songwriter romanticising down-and-outs and ordinary life, but whereas Waits did it via deliberately outmoded, backwards-looking jazz and later by twisted, bizarre mutant blues, Springsteen did it via fairly generic arena rock. To my mind, for years it seemed that Springsteen was simply a more unimaginative and generic figure than Waits, exploring the same ideas in less musically inventive ways. Ultimately, that's true. But what I didn't appreciate at the time was first just how good Springsteen was, and continues to be, at writing monstrously catchy, memorable, cool and downright incredible rock music. Ambitious or groundbreaking it may not be, but his music is always enormously listenable and fun and anthemic. Secondly, it's easy to assume that just because music is fairly generic it robs it of value, and actually a lot of the power of Springsteen comes from  its relative simplicity - his work is a million miles from the avant-garde rumblings of Tom Waits, but what comes through the simple band arrangements is a true purity of spirit and a touching honesty and power that comes from its unaffectedness. I finally came round to giving Springsteen my attention last September, when my brother urged me to listen to The Ghost Of Tom Joad, his mid-90s acoustic folk album, a weird starting point by any stretch of the imagination. I dutifully obeyed and soon found myself obsessed by the Boss, devoting much of the last year to learning more about his work, and ended up seeing him live at Wembley earlier this year, an event which now ranks as one of the best live gigs I've seen despite how recently he had captured my imagination.

I came to The Wild, The Innocnt & The E Street Shuffle fairly late, having already become familiar with his other albums to have taken on classic status like Born To Run or Born In The U.S.A. Again, it took the recommendation of my brother (a big Springsteen fan, though I think I've since outstripped him in terms of my knowledge of the guy's work) to bother giving it a listen, as he insisted it was the best party album Springsteen had ever released, or perhaps that anyone had. That's ultimately the best summing-up of this album it's possible to give. There is barely a song here that couldn't fail to ignite any party with a fire and an energy, and it's the first album to really give a glimpse of the incredible heights Springsteen would achieve over the coming decades. In 1973, Springsteen had achieved a bit of local acclaim on the Jersey shore in a number of local bands like Earth and Steel Mill, which channelled a kind of raw rock-and-roll energy and power unseen in any local artist up until that point. But the music industry was yet to pay any attention to him. Eventually, John Hammond succeeded in getting him signed to Colombia Records by touting as the "next Bob Dylan" (who Hammond had also championed way back in the early 60s). Ultimately, it's that attempt to force Springsteen into a particular bracket that hampers his debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. While Springsteen is a great storyteller, he is no great poet and his lyrics are powerful in their unaffected simplicity rather than in their rich imagery or language in the vein of Dylan. So, to listen to an album where he tries his hardest to write imaginative poetry to be set to fairly unimginative folk rock accompaniments is a fairly tedious experience. A couple of songs, like "Spirit In The Night" and "Blinded By The Light" gave a glimpse of where Springsteen's real talent lay - in writing genuinely exciting rock music for a band to have fun with. In later years he would get to try again at the folk troubadour thing with much more success having abandoned the whole "new Dylan" ambitions, but for the time being he shifted his focus onto becoming a full-blown rockstar rather than the poetic voice of his generation.

The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, then, puts the focus onto the full band rather than on Springsteen as a figure in isolation. The first iteration of what would come to be called the E Street Band and would become his closest musical cohorts over the coming decades, propel this music which utilises them not just as marginalised session men but as the driving force of the music itself. Whether it's in David Sancious' and Danny Federici's piano and organ parts grounding "Incident On 57th Street" or Clarence Clemons's scene-stealing saxophone turns on "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," Springsteen himself is the anchor here for an impeccable full-band rock record rather than being the sole figure of any note. As mentioned above, the spirit here, in general, is one of delirious fun and effortless cool, as befits a truly well-integrated band setup. "The E Street Shuffle" itself resembles a sped-up and more spirited version of "Blinded By The Light" and establishes the party mood in fine form, although some of the energy is drained by the next track, the fairly limp "4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." Again, the tender love song is another form he would go on to do much better later, but here it struggles to convince and it takes something as incendiary as "Kitty's Back" to win back the listener's attention. It's a truly pyrotechnic and relentless piece of rock, showcasing what is really the only full-blown guitar solo in Springsteen's entire discography and what would be one of the most exciting, compulsive sing-along climaxes ever were it not for the presence of "Rosalita" on the same song. "Wild Billy's Circus Story" is another dip in energy for a piece of slow, meditative storytelling that's again a little unconvincing.

The album's second side is just a succession of one unbeatably brilliant track after another. "Incident On 57th Street" is another mid-tempo song but is rousing enough to keep up the momentum. From its piano-based intro to its chanted finale accompanied by Springsteen's fiery guitar licks, it's a truly affecting piece of music that segues perfectly into one of the most enjoyable songs in all rock music. "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" is a breakneck party anthem giving room for Sancious, Federici and Clemons to really let rip while also boasting one of the catchiest, most deliriously joyful choruses of all time. There's also a gloriously cathartic brag from Springsteen as he exults at suddenly being on a journey to rock and roll stardom after struggling to achieve anything as a teenager, joyfully crying "So your daddy says he knows that I don't have any money, well tell him this is his last chance to get his daughter in a fine romance, 'cos the record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance!" Finally, as the thoughtful, reflective comedown from the dizzy highs of "Rosalita," there's the elegiac beauty of "New York City Serenade," which really demonstrates how good he could be at writing a tender ballad when he put a bit more effort into it than he did with "4th Of July, Asbury Park." David Sancious's lengthy piano introduction is a masterful showcase of his talent, managing classical grandiosity and bluesy frills before Springsteen's own achingly beautiful acoustic guitar kicks in with the main melody and he starts singing a tenderly observed tribute to the lives of down-and-outs in the city. There's a kind of late-night bluesiness and weariness to the song and it makes for the ultimate slow, resigned fading into nothing after the delirious extremes of the music that's led up to it.

With only two duff songs out of seven, it's a remarkably consistent album for such a young and inexperienced artist who only earlier the same year had released an album that felt so muddy and confused in terms of what it was trying to do. Here, Springsteen was in his element and succeeded in delivering music that, in the wake of his later success, would come to be remembered as eternal rock classics. Though it was given a fair amount of critical acclaim, it failed to sell well (its songs, with only a couple of exceptions, are too lengthy for mainstream radio airplay, or to sell well as singles), and Colombia were on the point of dropping Springsteen as he didn't seem to have succeeded in capitalising on the potential Hammond had spotted in him. He needed to write one true hit song in order to prove himself and to really make his name. That song would come a couple of years later and would cement him as one of the true greats, but for those who actually heard this earlier album, it was obvious already how significant he would become.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Bruce Springsteen.

1. The E Street Shuffle

2. 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

3. Kitty's Back

4. Wild Billy's Circus Story

5. Incident On 57th Street

6. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)

7. New York City Serenade

Billy Joel - Piano Man

Released - November 1973

Genre - Rock

Producer - Michael Stewart

Selected Personnel - Billy Joel (Vocals/Piano/Keyboards/Harmonica); Larry Carlton (Guitar); Eric Weissberg (Banjo); Wilton Felder (Bass/Keyboards); Emory Gordy, Jr (Bass); Michael Omartian (Accordion); Dean Parks (Guitar); Ron Tutt (Drums)

Standout Track - Piano Man

Billy Joel's breakthrough second album is almost certainly the deserved winner of the dubious accolade of "Most Incongruously Terrifying Album Cover Ever." It's a shame, as this is an album with plenty of great music to recommend it, but that terrifying, soft-focus, dead-eyed portrait with its lank hair will always be the most stand-out, memorable thing about this album. It might be understandable if the horror movie menace of that shot were mirrored anywhere on the album's actual content, but given that this is an album of upbeat, jaunty country rock, it's an astoundingly weird choice of artwork. Anyway, when one gets over the unsettling elephant in the room of Joel's weird face, this is an early classic from a man who would go on to be one of the finest singer-songwriters of the 70s, a sort of American counterpart to Britain's Elton John, similarly making hugely well-crafted piano-based rock that might not have pushed many musical boundaries but more than delivered in its undeniable sense of innate musicality and catchiness. I've been a big fan of Billy Joel since I was about twelve or thirteen, although as is so often the case with artists I've known about for a long time, my full interest in the whole scope of his career was a more recent thing. My brother sang a rendition of Joel's beautiful 80s ballad "And So It Goes" in our school's House Music Festival one year and it was a song that had a huge impact on me and drove me to discover something called Billy Joel Greatest Hits Volume Three, the only Billy Joel record I could find among my stepdad's collection. Essentially a compendium of Joel's later hits from the 80s, they became a part of the soundtrack to my teens and I devoured them, somehow never being curious enough to try and find out what Volumes One and Two might have contained. So it was to my surprise a couple of years ago when my friends Emily and Paul recommended an album called The Stranger to me as his finest work, considering the fact that none of its songs were on the greatest hits collection I was familiar with. As any Billy Joel fan will be able to assume, I was blown away by that album and am now well aware that it represents the pinnacle of his career, and was quickly spurred into finding more of his work. Before long I found myself listening to Piano Man, which would become the album to really launch his career due to the success of its title track and the wonderful "Captain Jack."

First of all, Piano Man is nothing compared to The Stranger and anybody familiar with that album hoping for something similar will be disappointed, particularly by the album's second half, which is mostly fairly flat. Not only is the quality not as good, it's a very stylistically different album. Whereas that later classic would be frequently mining a jazzier aesthetic, the focus here is more on country and folk music, albeit all distilled via Joel's inherently jazzy piano acrobatics. Joel himself had already released one album at this point, entitled Cold Spring Harbor, which had failed to draw much critical notice or commercial success. He responded by doing what he could to evade the stifling terms of his recording contract and to set himself up anew with Colombia Records so that he could effectively start from scratch (the result of this evasive action was many years of legal wrangling between the two labels, which wouldn't be resolved until much later in the 70s). I've actually never got round to listening to Cold Spring Harbor, but Piano Man, despite its shortcomings, showcases an undeniable talent obviously destined for great things. While Joel would later experiment more with full band arrangements, the focus here is rightly kept tightly on Joel himself, his voice and piano. Joel's voice is again reminiscent of Elton John's in the fact that it's not particularly unusual or remarkable, but is assured and confident and pleasant enough for the listener to easily overlook the fact that there such voices were hardly difficult to find on the contemporary music scene. I've always loved voices that bleed with character, from the bluesy whine of Randy Newman to the nasal twang of David Bowie or the raspy growl of Tom Waits, but sometimes when a voice is as strident and clear as Billy Joel's it doesn't rob the music of any character as some other overly "perfect" voices can.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a terribly top-heavy album, with its first side consisting of some of Joel's very best early songs. "Travellin' Prayer" is a playful country-infected classic, propelled by the galloping percussion and Joel's frenetic vocal performance as he prays for the loved one he's travelling home to see to be kept safe. Like Newman, Joel has a knack for writing in character and for imbuing his songs with a sense of story that goes beyond the typical confessional singer-songwriter approach - whether it's the sense of a road-weary but homeward bound traveller on that opening track or the world-weary wastrel of "Captain Jack," these songs feel like snapshots of a particular array of desert characters. Perhaps the greatest snapshot of all is the timeless "Piano Man," perhaps Joel's signature song even to this day. Written as a heartfelt tribute to the years he spent as the piano player in a bar to pay his way, its infectiously joyous melody and harmonica riff belies the sense of unease in its portrayals of lives lived through desperation or routine. Rather touchingly, the song even finds time to include a brief sketch of a woman who would come to be Joel's first wife, Elizabeth, who is the "waitress practising politics." It might be difficult for a song to follow such an upbeat classic, but "Ain't No Crime" does an admirable job, sounding like one of the bluesier cuts from Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection, and then follows "You're My Home," one of the most simple and affecting love songs Joel ever penned, and also a rare song for him in that it's built around a simple acoustic guitar riff rather than piano. It's a beautifully understated and heartfelt song, but from that point onwards the album struggles to keep up its momentum.

"The Ballad Of Billy The Kid" is a Western epic (again featuring echoes of Elton John in its musical and thematic similarities to Madman Across The Water's "Indian Sunset,") that feels suitably dramatic and cinematic, but after that is a series of fairly by-the-numbers country rock songs that don't do much to get the pulse racing or to tug at the heartstrings. Thankfully, just as a sense of fatigue begins to set in, things are rounded off in spectacular fashion by the beautiful "Captain Jack," another of Joel's early masterpieces. It sketches in lurid detail the lifestyle of a young teenager whose lack of ambition or passion has driven him to a meaningless lifestyle of drug-dealing and masturbation, and its slow, melancholic tune oozes with desperation and pity. The vaguely triumphant mood of the chorus is all the more tragic in its biting irony, as the only semblance of any excitement or hope in this teenager's life is the promise of more drugs from the dealer "Captain Jack." It's a wonderfully poignant and well-crafted epic, and perhaps Joel's most acute and incisive character sketches.

That masterful song does a lot to erase the feelings of vague boredom that begin to set in prior to it, but there's no denying that Piano Man is an album with drawbacks and plenty of filler. No matter for Joel, as a radio broadcast of a live performance of "Captain Jack" would soon see a huge amount of critical notice around Joel slowly propelling him towards the solid gold greatness he would achieve later in the decade. For the time being, he had more than proven himself as an enviable talent to watch out for, and it would only be a few years before he truly capitalised on the obvious potential showcased on this album. Of course, there would be misfires before then - he would make the fairly disappointing Streetlife Serenade before delivering anything else truly essential - but one can't deny listening to Piano Man that, filler aside, this was somebody who would go on to make some truly remarkable music.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Billy Joel.

1. Travellin' Prayer

2. Piano Man

3. Ain't No Crime

4. You're My Home

5. The Ballad Of Billy The Kid

6. Worse Comes To Worst

7. Stop In Nevada

8. If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You)

9. Somewhere Along The Line

10. Captain Jack

Yes - Close To The Edge

Released - September 1972

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - Yes & Eddy Offord

Selected Personnel - Jon Anderson (Vocals); Steve Howe (Guitar); Rick Wakeman (Keyboards); Chris Squire (Bass); Bill Bruford (Drums/Percussion)

Standout Track - And You & I

For many, this is one of the defining moments in prog rock history. Although the spirit of prog's excess and complexity had already been mercilessly lambasted with Jethro Tull's timeless one-song album Thick As A Brick earlier the same year, Close To The Edge will always be seen as one of the definitive pinnacles of that approach to making music. It was also the album that put me off Yes for a good couple of years before finally finding my way into liking them via 1971's The Yes Album. Back when I was keen to discover all things new and all things prog, I listened to the first five minutes of the title track from this album and, not liking what I heard, decided I couldn't be bothered to make time for Yes. By the time I was into the band enough to feel like I really couldn't continue to ignore the album generally considered their magnum opus, I'd learned to have patience with things I was unfamiliar with, and persevered enough with Close To The Edge to realise that it's one of the band's crowning achievements, although it's never quite been able to find as strong a place in my affections as The Yes Album did.

In the wake of the success of Fragile, including their first ever hit single in "Roundabout," Yes had proved that they were one of the few bands able to achieve both the critical notice and acclaim afforded to the artistic pioneering of the prog circle while also gaining mainstream and chart success. It perhaps made sense, then, for their next step to be an attempt to prove that they had what it takes to really push the boundaries of music-making and to turn their hand to some of the extreme complexity and ambition of their prog rock peers. On Fragile they had begun experimenting with more long-form songwriting, the album being structured around three lengthy tent-pole tracks and a number of short interludes. This time, the band's energies would be channelled into producing an album of only three lengthy piece, one of which would take up the entire first side. As such, the band's approach to composition is noticeably different here - the focus is no longer on catchy riffs or memorable hooks, but on compelling musical ideas which can be developed and taken off in new directions, and then repeated in new contexts to sustain a lengthy suite. Perhaps the only moment on the entire album that qualifies as a truly memorable "hook" is the joyfully pretty acoustic riff midway through "And You & I" (accompanied by Jon Anderson's trills of "There'll be no mutant enemies, we shall certify,") plus perhaps that opening, blistering electric riff at the start of "Siberian Khatru." But for the most part, the listener isn't looking for immediate gratification in the form of catchy choruses or compelling melodies here. Rather, it's a search for being transported somewhere new by music that is wholly compelling and inventive and transformative and always refreshingly different, and in that respect it delivers in spades.

Much has been made of an increasing sense of spirituality in Anderson's lyrics around this time, as he became increasingly fascinated by Hindu and Buddhist mysticism, and whether or not this sense of spiritual transformation that increasingly took hold of his imagination had a knock-on effect on the kind of music Yes were creating is difficult to say, but Close To The Edge certainly feels more like it's trying to take you on an imaginative journey than any previous Yes album (or, arguably, any since) - with such lengthy songs, it's impossible for it to not keep things hugely inventive and dynamic and transportational, or it would simply collapse under the weight of its own ambition. Perhaps as a direct result of this sense of spiritual movement, the album's strongest moments are its moments of tranquil reflection rather than of dynamism and energy. To this day, I'll still defend myself by saying that my initial reaction to the opening of the title track was built on firm foundations - it eventually turns into one of Yes's finest songs, but it starts off with a faintly irritating, and certainly by-the-numbers for Yes, array of clattering percussion from Bill Bruford and twanging guitar from Steve Howe - all things we've seen Yes do before and do better on the instrumental passages of Fragile. While Anderon's vocals bring a welcome change of pace, it's not until the tempo drops completely in the "I get up, I get down" middle section of the song that it becomes something truly wonderful. Rick Wakeman's shimmering keyboard textures are breathtakingly beautiful in this part of the song, and there's an almost proto-ambient sense of tranquillity to things, a good year before Brian Eno started taking even his first tentative steps to pioneering that genre. The triumphant organ crescendo that accompanies Anderson's continued declamatory cries of "I get up, I get down" usher back in the musical motifs of the song's opening before fading back out into the same sounds of running water and birdsong that the album started on.

The other great tranquil moment is the album's true highpoint, the beautiful ballad "And You & I" that opens side two. At nine minutes, it's of course far more complex and ambitious than any traditional ballad, but it's also perhaps the most conventional of the three songs here. The simple, bright acoustic guitar riff, anchored by Chris Squire's contentedly chugging bass, is a real delight, and that aforementioned moment halfway through when the riff comes back in with full clarity and confidence is a moment of true exhilaration and one of Yes's greatest musical achievements. "Siberian Khatru," with its fearsome pace and pyrotechnic guitar work from Steve Howe, plus the menacing, almost apocalyptic cyclical chants it moves through, is another absolute triumph of a song and the closest this album gets to a true rocker, but it lacks some of the focus and precision of the other two songs here, though it does provide an important sense of dynamism that the album would lack if the closing track had been another mid-tempo number.

While Wakeman was only credited as a writer for one of the three songs ("Siberian Khatru,") his influence on the development of the material was crucial and perhaps one of the key features in the album taking the final form it did. Knowing they wanted to craft an album around three lengthy suites, the band turned to Wakeman, who had a classical and traditional musical upbringing and a better understanding of the structure and composition of music than the rest of them, to help resolve these disparate musical ideas in a way that was satisfactory. As such, Wakeman set about developing the motifs and the recycling of ideas in order for the songs to feel like complete pieces of work rather than isolated ideas, and it's fair to say that Close To The Edge would be a very different entity were it not for his collaborations in this regard. The band seemed to be in a fairly staid and healthy place at the time of recording, and the gap between Fragile and Close To The Edge was the first inter-album gap for a while to not feature any changes to the lineup (and would be the last to do so for several years, too).

Sadly, that wasn't to last, and drummer Bill Bruford has cited several times that he suggested the names of those two albums as they represented the delicate internal wranglings of the group at the time. Whether or not these internal politics were things perceived only by him or whether they did affect the group as a whole, he would be gone by the time of Close To The Edge's followup album, Tales From Topographic Oceans, having defected to join none other than King Crimson, a band pushing all the same boundaries and making the same bold statements as Yes but without any of the chart success. Tales From Topographic Oceans would unwisely attempt to one-up the achievements of this classic album by crafting a double album out of four twenty-minute epics, none of which really has enough of a central musical idea to justify even half of its running time. By the time the band produced another album of genuine worth and quality in the form of 1974's Relayer, Rick Wakeman would also have parted company with the band, though not for long. Still, all these trials were still to come for Yes, and for now it was time for them to bask in the glory of being crowned the kings of prog - they had achieved mainstream success and now they had managed to deliver an album more ambitious and over-the-top and complex than anything else in prog, perhaps even than Tull's masterful piss-take. It wouldn't be long before prog would begin to suffer hugely in the public's affection, but it's just possible that Close To The Edge represents the very pinnacle of all it achieved, even if, for my money, it's not quite got the heart and the charm of their other masterpiece, The Yes Album.

Track Listing:

1. Close To The Edge (Jon Anderson & Steve Howe)

2. And You & I (Jon Anderson; Steve Howe; Chris Squire & Bill Bruford)

3. Siberian Khatru (Jon Anderson; Steve Howe & Rick Wakeman)

Wishbone Ash - Argus

Released - April 1972

Genre - Hard Rock

Producer - Derek Lawrence

Selected Personnel - Andy Powell (Guitar/Vocals); Ted Turner (Guitar/Vocals); Martin Turner (Bass/Vocals); Steve Upton (Drums); John Tout (Organ)

Standout Track - The King Will Come

Wishbone Ash's landmark third album has been a hugely significant album for me and for my musical awareness for about five years now, and is one I never, ever tire of going back to. As I've detailed several times already on this blog, my musical life up until uni had involved becoming obsessed by the music I naturally found myself surrounded by - growing up on my stepdad's classic rock collection or my mum's folk records, and loving all of them, letting them turn into some kind of comprehensive and exhaustive soundtrack for my life, but rarely digging particularly deep or following my curiosity. I would listen to the albums we had at home, sometimes perhaps buy a new CD of a band I really, really liked or of something I heard in a film that I enjoyed, and that was it. I very rarely even bothered to listen to something I didn't already own, or already had a huge passion for and a real vested interest in finding out more about. That started to change at uni, where I was driven to discover more in the discographies of the artists I already liked (Supertramp, Focus, Bad Company et al). And then in my second year I started being prompted to go outside my comfort zone a bit and to listen to artists I'd never even heard of before, let alone being familiar with their work. It was the same sort of time that drove me to discover artists already covered in this blog, from Steely Dan to Pink Floyd to King Crimson, but one of the first was Wishbone Ash. My friend Jack gave me a copy of Argus, saying it would probably enjoy it if I had even a vague fondness for classic 70s rock. I wasn't disappointed. Wishbone Ash would shortly after become the first band I ever saw live and, while their studio output was never consistent enough for me to bother listening to their entire back catalogue, their early 70s work is up there with the finest blues/hard-rock outfits around and Argus in particular is one of my all-time favourites.

After the band's self-titled debut album, which presented a fearsomely talented and innovative new group but was let down in places by weak material (certainly compared to what they deliver here), it took them a little while to really achieve their potential. The followup was a decent but forgettable album called Pilgrimage, which included the great "Jail Bait" but also a lot of fairly hum-drum bluesy jams or acoustic instrumentals. Quite what seismic shift prompted the incredible leap in the quality of material on Argus isn't clear, but it's not long into the classic opener "Time Was" that it becomes clear just how good an album this is going to be. While the general mood is of heavy-hitting, bluesy hard rock, the opening of "Time Was" grounds the album squarely in earthy, introspective folk music via the pastoral acoustic intro. It's a mood that runs throughout the album, even in its hardest and most urgent moments. There's something about the harmonies and the sound of the album itself that keeps this feeling akin to folk music in some way, no doubt helped by its recurring antiquated themes of high fantasy - "The King Will Come," "Warrior" and "Throw Down The Sword" effectively form a blisteringly good trilogy of songs revolving around the Medieval iconography of battles and war, reinforced further by that iconic artwork.

But, though it feels grounded in an earthy, folksy sensibility, this is at its awe-inspiring best when the band really lets loose. After that folksy intro, "Time Was" picks up the pace and turns into a free-spirited bluesy jam in the vein of the Allman Brothers Band, and the band's signature trick of its twin guitar leads from Andy Powell and Ted Turner makes its first appearance, the two trading licks and solos and interweaving harmonies effortlessly. "Sometime World" repeats the trick of the opening track, shifting from a slow, introspective opening into an urgent monster of guitar riffs and solos, but is brilliant enough to get away with it. "Blowin' Free," despite being one of Wishbone Ash's most popular songs, is easily the most tedious and predictable song on the album, and ably demonstrates the appalling lows the band had to stoop to when it came to writing lyrics, a long way from one of their strengths - "Her hair was golden brown, blowing free like a cornfield." It's also where the joint vocals of Powell and both Turners are at their most grating, and the listener is reminded that when they try to shift focus too far away from their innovative guitar techniques, their weaknesses begin to show more readily.

Thankfully, "Blowin' Free" leads into one of the most undeniably brilliant hard rock songs of all time in the form of "The King Will Come," which slowly builds through its quiet, ominous opening until its ferocious, brutal riff explodes into the air, heralding the arrival of what is, "Phoenix" aside, Wishbone Ash's finest song. After the brute force of "The King Will Come," "Leaf And Stream" comes as a pleasant acoustic interlude before "Warrior," more than any other song here, anticipates the heavy sounds of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the 80s (which would mimic Wishbone Ash's twin guitar approach). Then there's the epic lament of the closer, "Throw Down The Sword," which is simply one of the most beautifully elegiac and powerful songs in the catalogues of simple guitar-based rock, with its climactic guitar solo a moment of incredible catharsis that channels all the awe and grandiosity of the album as a whole into one final moment of release.

As a whole, it's an undeniable masterpiece - the songs all mine similar musical and lyrical territory so that they sit together wonderfully as a collection, but never become so similar that the album feels tired or predictable. Powell and Turner acquit themselves as two of the most innovative and harmonious guitarists around, while also having an all-important ability to not just play their instruments with speed and power but to make them sound cool, and interesting and different. Argus would deservedly prove to be their commercial peak and would go down as their finest, crowning achievement. The follow-up was a fairly tepidly-received album called Wishbone Four that I've never even got round to listening to, after which original lead guitarist Ted Turner would leave the band. With a new guitarist, they released one more album a couple of years after Argus that's also managed to find its way into my good-books (albeit a lot more slowly than this immediate classic), after which it was a case of continuing fading fortunes and a string of poorly-received albums that I've never been able to convince myself to listen to. A shame that such an innovative band should fade to obscurity to such an extent, but in their early 70s prime they were virtually peerless, and this album is the ultimate testament to that fact.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Andy Powell, Ted Turner, Martin Turner and Steve Upton.

1. Time Was

2. Sometime World

3. Blowin' Free

4. The King Will Come

5. Leaf And Stream

6. Warrior

7. Throw Down The Sword