Yes

When the average rock listener talks about prog, the reference album is the debut by King Crimson. In truth, that record — as beautiful and mythologized as it may be — doesn't represent full expressive maturity even for the band that made it, let alone for the genre as a whole. Anyone truly immersed in this world knows the real north star is another record entirely, titled "Close To The Edge".

A flawless engine of progressive rock and an extremely rare case of an album without a single note out of place or a moment too many, on this record the line between balance and sophistication, between drive and tenderness, between architecture and mysticism simply disappears. The spell is such that the dissonances of the electric instruments come across as delicate, while conversely the acoustic arpeggios swell up as though they were symphonies.

The complexity here is matched only by the communicative power of this music, which — without so much as the shadow of a radio-friendly track — climbed to number 4 in the UK and number 3 in the US in the autumn of '72.

Introducing it is the striking cover art by illustrator Roger Dean: a simple green background that gradually darkens toward the top until it nearly turns black, with no imagery besides the title and the Yes bubble logo, which from that point on became a kind of official trademark of the band.

This is the fifth album by Yes, the second and last album by what is still considered their most prestigious lineup, featuring Jon Anderson on vocals, Chris Squire on bass, Bill Bruford on drums, Steve Howe on guitars and Rick Wakeman on keyboards.

The record is the culmination of a steady crescendo, which shifted up a gear in 1970 with the arrival of Howe, a talent capable of forging a cohesive style out of fragments of country, rock, funk, jazz, ragtime, flamenco and Celtic folk. The following year came Wakeman, with his vast arsenal of electronic keyboards and a neoclassical style so elegant it had made him the most in-demand session player in the country.

The two prestigious additions blend perfectly with the original core, with Bruford chiseling out intricate rhythms with jazzy touches and Squire developing multifaceted bass lines, mixed at unusually high volumes, within a flow of shifting tempos and odd time signatures. Alongside the superb instrumental performances, Squire's playing interlocks with Anderson's voice, creating crystalline harmonies, among the most characteristic of the era.

If "Fragile" is the first record with a production able to match their unrestrained ambitions, "Close To The Edge" is the achievement of a total vision, one ruled by impeccable proportions and a pursuit of beauty, a kind of rock equivalent of the great Renaissance frescoes.

The attention to detail became exhausting: producer Eddie Offord — a collaborator since 1970 — reportedly collapsed with fatigue over the console more than once. Just to create the sound of streams, birds and wind chimes that opens the album, a twelve-meter tape had to be painstakingly assembled. "Today you'd just have to press two buttons," Wakeman would remark years later to journalist Chris Welch. Thinking about it, it's clear that many of rock's greatest innovations were born precisely from grappling with the technological limits of their time.

The album's first side is taken up by the title track, running almost nineteen minutes. Its bucolic introduction soon gives way to an instrumental jungle in compound meter, driven by an ascending scale from Squire. Around it, Howe blazes with lightning-fast picking that traces sharp, angular lines, while Wakeman conjures incomprehensible squeals apparently obtained by somehow altering the electric organ — or so it's assumed, since that sound was never reproduced live.

Out of the chaos emerges a song with a chameleonic structure, punctuated by arabesques of every kind: the Morse-code organ starting at the five-minute mark, the famous staccato bass at 6'04", flashes of Mellotron, and compulsively recurring keyboard micro-themes.

At 8'30" the track suddenly dissolves, as if falling into a pool of water. Placid layers of synthesizer coil slowly upward in an ascent to paradise that effectively anticipates half of new age's discography. After a baroque triumph of pipe organ, recorded in St Giles' church in London, the rhythm section storms back in and Wakeman throws himself at the Hammond, unleashing an avalanche of notes. The band thus reconnects with song form and flows into an ecstatic finale, in which the instruments fade back into the pastoral sounds from which they arose.

A possible sonic metaphor for life and an inquiry into existence with an Eastern philosophical bent — which explains its cyclical structure — "Close To The Edge" stages Anderson's mental imagery. Its lyrics are a miscellany touching on death, happiness, and the human condition as a multitude of souls ("Close to any streams that ever were and now, on the seat of a look that time and time again bring back and forth the truth so plain, close to the child of what we're up against"), but also offer some welcome polemical jabs at organized religion ("How many millions do we deceive each day?").

Anderson is also interested in form, which, like any good musical architect, he considers inseparable from substance, and together with Squire and Howe he crafts vocal harmonies that are intense and refined, constantly playing with meter, tonality and wording. Famous is the device of interpolating the words of one of the refrains each time, creating new sounds and meanings while always keeping the same cadence ("Down at the edge, close by a river/ Close to the edge, round by the corner/ Close to the end, down by the corner/ Down at the edge, round by the river [...] Down at the edge, round by the corner").

The second side opens with "And You And I", a composite baroque-folk ballad interrupted by a few graceful surges and by majestic Mellotron and Moog themes, forging yet another connection between outer space and meditative intimacy. Particularly memorable are the acoustic guitar harmonics that open the piece and the powerful cymbal crashes that punctuate its most solemn passages.

A sort of funk-inflected bridge between the Renaissance and a fantasy-saga future, "Siberian Khatru" is the album's moment that comes closest to being a proper song. Despite containing numerous variations, it revolves around a guitar riff and a keyboard theme, flowing more like a unified stream than a patchwork. It's amusing that it's considered the record's simplest track, since it's actually extremely intricate: Wakeman lavishing an harpsichord solo and embroidering with the Mellotron, Howe dropping an intense off-beat digression at 3'47", Squire's bass mutating throughout, moving from bursts of distorted notes to velvety, swing-like steps — or rather, how swing might sound in a Victorian science-fiction novel.

The lyrics are among Anderson's most incomprehensible, a collage of landscape juxtapositions and disjointed phrases, practically untranslatable, but among the boldest on a sonic level, as shown by the crescendo of paired terms from 5'27" onward, eventually spilling into an onomatopoeic break, by which point the voice is nothing more than a timbre and verbal communication becomes superfluous. The album closes with an instrumental fugue built around the keyboard theme, which slowly dissolves, leaving behind an aftertaste that is both epic and melancholic.

As impossible as it is to surpass, the record does not mark the end of the band's creative journey, as some extremists claim. Every Yes album up to and including "90125" is worth hearing and contains — in greater or lesser amounts — compositions of absolute quality, progressively enriched by new members joining the lineup and by an insatiable appetite for tackling innovative technologies and styles seemingly foreign to their path.

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08/11/2015