Within the notoriously fickle winds of critical and public taste, one thing has remained remarkably constant since at least the mid-'70s, and that is the general disdain for progressive rock among tastemakers and otherwise hip people (not to mention the general public, which barely had time for prog in its commercial and critical heyday, what with all that Elton John music to listen to). There have been moments where it has gained a modicum of respectability: Radiohead's release of OK Computer, the film Buffalo '66, James Murphy's use of prog staples in his DJ setlists, the continuing work and increased visibility of Steven Wilson (who has recently been responsible for some fantastic remasters of progressive rock classics, including a recent one of today's subject, ol' Topographic Oceans itself). And in our current era of inclusive taste, poptimism, and virulent anti-elitism, it's entirely possible that prog's days as pop culture pariah may be behind it—after all, disco managed it.
But for decades, this is what held true among those who cared: progressive rock was stuffy, mannered, bloated, fey, pretentious (ah yes, that old word), a genre too in love with its own cleverness and the creation of byzantine conceptual virtuosity to have anything of an emotional spark, a betrayal of the white light/white heat of rock's true spirit pioneered by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and later by Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. As James Franco's character on Freaks and Geeks puts it, "Rock 'n roll doesn't come from your brain; it comes from your crotch." And when someone gets on a good rant about prog's excess, it's always Yes's sixth album, Tales from Topographic Oceans that gets named as Exhibit A.
Clearly, I'm a prog apologist, or I wouldn't be writing this series. I also happen to think that Tales from Topographic Oceans is pretty good, and I'll get to that in a moment. But let's be fair to the haters here. This is what Topographic Oceans is: an 82-minute, double-LP concept album wherein each of its four tracks occupy an entire LP side a piece and rhapsodize on each of the four Hindu shastras as inspired by lead singer Jon Anderson's obsession with, as he calls it, "a lengthy footnote" in the autobiography of Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda. I'm out of breath just typing that, and that's not even the end of it. The album liner notes also lets us know that the album's four tracks are "movements," not songs. The liner notes also show, just in case you missed it when you listened, that the lyrics are written in several different languages. They also mention that Anderson, along with guitarist Steve Howe, composed the record's music by candlelight.
So when people accuse Topographic Oceans as being overly complex, mannered, in love with conceptual virtuosity, etc., I think it's best to own up and admit that oh yes, it certainly is.
It wasn't always this way for Yes. a band who formed in 1968 sounding very much of a piece with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and any number of psychedelic-leaning hard rock bands of the time, albeit one set apart by Jon Anderson's limber and ethereal vocals, often backed by delicate folk harmonies. In fact, Lester Bangs himself (one of rock's preeminent "crotch, not brain" critics) had positive things to say about Yes's self-titled debut. But with each successive release, Yes accumulated both band members and ambitions, first Steve Howe and a penchant for grandiose, multi-part epics on their third record, The Yes Album, and then flamboyant keyboardist Rick Wakeman and classical-infused, lengthy instrumental breaks on 1971's Fragile (an album that scored the band its biggest hit single in "Roundabout," an 8-minute jam with a killer groove that radio audiences devoured when shortened to its single-length 3-minute cut, and to this day, it's one of the few prog rock tracks that's still a regular in the classic rock radio circuit). Things came to a head in 1972, an all-around banner year for prog in general and Yes in particular with the release of the towering Close to the Edge. It's an album in which all the band's percolating talents and proclivities up to that point congealed into something truly magnificent: three songs, one occupying an entire LP side, the other two both lasting nearly ten minutes, that each showcase a dizzyingly complex interplay of instruments, words, and production to craft a cosmic wall of sounds and melody. Close to the Edge is nearly perfect, regarded both in the prog community and in music fandom at large as a masterpiece and one of the finest works prog ever produced.
So, like... where do you go from there? In 1973, Yes's answer turned out to be much the same as the rest of the progressive rock community, which, to conflate Pink Floyd with Icarus, was to set their controls for the heart of the sun. There's an exhilaration in prog's fat early-to-mid-'70s years that some people read as pretentious bloat but comes across to me much more as a giddy, incredulous curiosity to see just how high they could fly this machine. And they got pretty high, in both metaphorical ways you can take that.
So you've got something like Tales from Topographic Oceans, which, Hindu conceptual genesis aside, feels musically very much like someone in Yes took a look at Close to the Edge and said, "What if we did this again, but with more?" Yes's trajectory from their inception up until Close to the Edge had been one of steady innovation, where each successive record introduced a new musical element or ambition. Topographic Oceans, on the other hand, is the first Yes album to not sound sonically distinct from its predecessor—save for a few experiments late in the album's third and fourth quarters, there's not really anything here that couldn't have also been on Close to the Edge. On the whole, the main innovation here seems just to be the sheer maximalism of the thing. At over twice the length of Close to the Edge and with every one of its four "movements" as long or longer than Close to the Edge's 18-minute title track, Tales from Topographic Oceans is enormous even by prog's outsized standards.
The role of Tales as basically Close to the Edge, Vol. 2-5 could lead one to ask whether a lack of inhibitions and editing skills is really viable as a musical concept to inform the production of an album, and Tales from Topographic Oceans's legion of critics argue precisely this. I'd probably be inclined to ask that very question myself if it weren't for the fact that as a supersized return to Close to the Edge's landscapes, this album actually works really well. Oh, undoubtedly it's overlong, and Wikipedia cites an illuminating quote from Rick Wakeman in 2006, who says, "Because of the format of how records used to be, we had too much for a single album but not enough for a double.: This strikes me as about right; if Yes had had the luxury of the CD format available at the time, Topographic Oceans likely would have made a much better 65-70 minute album, shaving off some of the more padded sections of the first and second movements (which is where the album does kind of drag). But when this album's on, which happens the majority of the time, it's on. There are moments here that absolutely soar, particularly in the third and fourth movements: the cascading voices singing "As they don't seem to matter at all, at all, at all" over and over at the fourth's climax, the twisting grooves of the third's lengthy instrumental digressions, and a couple others are sections that I would actually rank above the best on Close to the Edge, and even when the album isn't besting Yes's masterpiece, it's still no slouch.
And actually, I'm selling the album a bit short by calling it a complete retread of Close to the Edge's sound; more than any other Yes album, there's an impulse toward music's experimental outskirts here that makes for some of the most interesting sounds in Yes's run, particularly on Movement Three, where it's clear the band is trying to make music that sounded like nothing people had heard before. Of course, this is all sandwiched between long stretches that do, in fact, sound a lot like Close to the Edge, and I do wish that this intermittently adventurous sonic experimentation overtook a bit more of the record. But it's there, enough so that it ruffled the feathers of Rick Wakeman, who dismissed the band as moving toward "avant-garde jazz rock" and left the group soon after touring the album for a legendarily bombastic solo career (a career in which he traded jazz rock for this, which... well, I guess there's no accounting for taste, but really). Relayer, the Yes album that immediately follows Tales, would take this allegation pretty seriously, doubling down on the jazz to the point where large chunks of the record are basically jazz fusion. It's alright.
It's not all bona-fide great, granted. As I said, this material would have been better served in a package 10-20 minutes shorter. But it's hardly the pile of vomit suggested by Pitchfork's 2.0/10.0 review, or even the notorious flew-too-close-to-the-sun hubris that energized punk, as claimed by so many punk documentaries (it's little remarked upon that various members of the Sex Pistols covered Yes songs at times). It's just, by my reckoning, a good—if flawed—record from a band at their musical height.
You'll notice I've not touched the intricate shastras lyrical concept that inspired the album, and frankly, that's because it's gobbledygook. Look, I'm all for religious experiences and lyrics that yearns for the sublime as Tales's seem to. It's clear that Anderson felt something extremely meaningful within the idea of the Hindu texts, and I mean, good for him. But these lyrics don't make a lick of sense beyond a very abstract sensory and mythical depiction of spiritual enlightenment. Maybe that abstraction is a feature, not a bug, of the album, and I'll attest to the fact that not really caring what the lyrics say do make them kind of meditative, just another instrument intertwined with the rest of the rich sonic atmosphere. Honestly, that's how I approach most Yes lyrics, too—I couldn't tell you much of what Close to the Edge was about, although there's a bit more to latch onto there. I suspect the lyrics here are a test of what kind of music listener you are, whether or not you're willing to simply let lyrics be sonic texture or whether you demand them to mean something that you can personally latch onto.
Which, I think, is a dichotomy of listening philosophy that can apply to progressive rock as a whole. Those who come to the genre looking to exegete the meaning of a piece of music are bound to be disappointed by prog's promises of heady intellectual concepts and intricate themes. That's there, and it's occasionally profound, but I've found that more often than not, prog as a whole falls into the same camp as Tales from Topographic Oceans's lyrics, swallowed up by abstraction and psychedelic meandering in a way that confounds deep study to anyone who isn't interested in reveling in how "heavy" all the sci-fi/fantasy/spiritual stuff is (another valid response, if seldom found outside of college freshmen). A much more rewarding way to approach prog is, I think, to view it as a sensory experience, where aesthetics become a kind of meaning rather than anything concretely expressible.
Maybe it's this approach that makes me like Tales from Topographic Oceans as much as I do. Whatever. I understand why this album wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea—heck, any album this long is probably going to cull its listener base quite a bit. But it's also an album that, as prog seemingly becomes less and less stigmatized, I hope to see go through a bit of a reevaluation over the next few years. Maybe that Steven Wilson remaster will get people listening to this thing again. Maybe Kanye will sample it on his next album (I'm only half joking here). There's a lot of riches to be found within its 82 minutes.
Until 1974!
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