This is definitely a prog rock album, but it's much closer to a cross between early Yes and the impending Larks-era of King Crimson than to contemporary Yes (though there's a curious "Roundabout" quote that pops up a couple of times in the first half). It's entirely instrumental and not at all song-based, and its primary purpose seems to be to allow Peter to work in as many of his favored approaches to guitar playing as he could. This means that album gets a little jammy and rambling in parts, and my attention sometimes drifts, but it's still a rather enjoyable listen on the whole.

The first half is taken up by six tracks that should be listened to as a single suite (the track names are "Vision of the King," "The White Horse Vale: On the Hill/Lord of the Dragon," "Knights: The Falcon/The Bear," "Battles," "Knights (Reprise)" and "Last Eclipse"). "Vision of the King" quickly builds from a thin layer of guitar sounds into a thick layering of electric guitar chords that are absolutely majestic, before dissolving into the acoustic intro of "The White Horse Vale," which spends its six minutes meandering through all sorts of acoustic and jazzy wah-wah licks, before it in turn morphs into "Knights." "Knights" has a discordant riff that makes me think of some of the better and noisier moments of Yes, but it's not as prominent as I tend to remember it; there are a lot of quieter stretches with two or three layers of Peter noodling about, but the noodling has enough interesting stuff going on that I don't get too annoyed (and it builds into a really nice angry frenzy before the riff comes back). Eventually "Battles" comes around (after a brief reprise of some of the best sounds from "Vision of the King"), and it's a bit of a noisy anti-climax (it's fine, but that much build-up seems like it should resolve into something more), and "Knights (Reprise)" (which brings back the "Knights" riff, with some silly guitar effects thrown in for good measure) and "Last Eclipse" (which closes things out with some final call-back to the "Vision of the King" quiet guitar meanderings) bring the suite to a nice but fairly predictable conclusion. All in all, the suite isn't spectacular, and it certainly doesn't live up to the sidelongs that Yes was doing at the time (I guess it's better than "The Ancient," but I'd definitely take "CTTE" and all of the other Tales tracks over this), but all Yes fans should definitely hear it.

The second side, after the aforementioned "Beyond the Loneliest Sea," consists of the 14-minute jazz-rock-fusion jam "Stop That!" and the closing "Get Out of My Fridge." "Get Out of My Fridge" actually sounds to me more like something I'd expect from a Steve Howe solo album than a Peter Banks solo album, courtesy of its focus on the kinds of electric prog-boogie licks that are Howe's calling card, and it's a lot of fun to hear Banks try to beat Howe at his own game. "Stop That!" is a decent jam, with Collins showing off his future Brand X-like jazzy rhythms and Ray Bennett contributing some very active bass, and Peter does his best to keep things interesting, though there's only so much that can be done once things blast beyond the 7 minute mark or so. My mind drifts a lot during this track, and while I basically enjoy it on the whole, I can't help but feel that Peter bit off a little more than he could chew here.

While this album isn't exactly any sort of lost classic, this is definitely a cut above average as far as Yes-related solo albums go, and it's worth hearing. As long as you go in with proper expectations (don't expect anything on par with the first Yes album, let alone anything from later), you should enjoy this if you're the type who likes Yes enough to seek out all the Yes-related material you can find.

I feel rather ambivalent towards this album, truth be told. I hated it the first time I listened to it, and even now when I basically like the album (even though the thought of saying so makes me cringe), there are quite a few things that bug me within it. Like, say, the voice of one of the male singers. One of the singers actually has a rather nice voice, which helps me enjoy the lovely melody of the first "song" of the album, but the other one must have had compromising photos of Rick with Jon Anderson to win the chance to sing on this album. He almost sounds like Gordon Haskell, and if you've read my King Crimson reviews, you'll know that that's about the biggest insult I can foist on a prog vocalist.

It's also a little annoying that, well, I can't really get that worked up about this album for more than a little dose at a time. It's neat to hear the main classical-based themes alternate with lovely ballads with mildly funky patterns with whatever (all underpinned with Rick's sci-fi synths, with sounds he rarely brought out in his Yes stint), but it's also very difficult to keep my attention from fading in and out, especially in the second half when the sung parts disappear for a very long time near the end. I could see myself enjoying brief snippets of this as one of Rick's solo interludes during later Yes concerts, but as a whole, tied all together with that snooty narrator? Meh, that's a little harder.

I guess the big problem I have overall is that, while I enjoy the album (for the most part), it also provides a clear example to me of why British prog rock, a perfectly decent genre from the early 70's, eventually earned so much disdain from so many people. Nice as it is, there are still too many orchestral passages that sound nice but undistinguished, too many synth passages that sound cool but kinda pointless, and too much of an all-encompassing feel of stuffiness throughout. And this bugs me, because I almost never feel this way with Yes. Anderson might have had pompous lyrical topics, but in essence he was just somebody who was very spiritual yet very confused, and who thought that singing (in his own bizarre way) about spiritual topics he liked would be neat. And as for the instrumentalists, well, I guess the best thing about having so much talent in the band was that no one person could outright dominate the musical direction of the group, whereas giving Wakeman full control resulted in things like this.

So ... I dunno. I like quite a good deal of this album, but I also feel dirty and ashamed in saying so. I probably won't listen to it again for a long time, though I am playing it as I write this, and I'm enjoying it, so draw your own conclusions. If you're a hardcore progger, you might love it, though.

PS: When I bought this album, the other CD I purchased was The Clash (US). I half expected my bag to burst into flames from a bad chemical reaction on the way home.

Well, as you can see, my gamble didn't really pay off. Anderson might have been the band's visionary, bringing in all sorts of goofy, interesting ideas that formed the basis for some of my favorite albums of all time, but he was still (by and large) a bit of a hack as a musician and composer. His ideas were good, but he needed the rest of Yes as much as they needed him, as they were the ones who cleaned up his ideas and made them something more than the ravings of a clever lunatic. On this album, the only person Anderson had to bounce ideas off of was himself, and while I can feel potential greatness in some of these tracks, none of them pull it off.

The best way I can think of to describe this album is as a cross between a 'cosmic' New Age album and Tormato, with just a smidge of prime Yes sprinkled here and there. Yup, a lot of the vocals on here sound just like "Madrigal" would a couple of years later, both in tone and in the rambling shove-too-many-words-into-each-line approach to the melodies. The sound is busy but never really engaging, with Jon layering keyboards, harps, acoustic guitars and whatever else struck his fancy onto melodies that almost never manage to capture my attention. He does manage to stumble into a pretty decent synth-driven chord sequence in "Solid Space," but even that song doesn't have much else to warrant praise. Other than that, except for the rambling vocals of "Sound Out the Galleon," I have trouble recalling even a single moment, good or bad, from this whole album.

I will grant that this album isn't terrible, as there are a number of places where I feel like the other Yesmen could have made something interesting out of what I'm hearing, and embryonic greatness isn't something to be totally dismissed. At the same time, listening to this is like eating half-baked bread; even if you can taste how good it might have been, it's hard to ignore the fact that you keep getting flour on your tongue. This is for hardcore completists only.

This is a very silly album. It's also an album with a good share of interesting ideas and themes, and more importantly it's one filled to the brim with piano mixed with all sorts of glorious 70's keyboard sounds, played with typically superhuman speed and fluidity. The opening title track may be underpinned by one of the lamest attempts at a "Latin" rhythm ever (at least that's how it sounds to me), and the keyboards may be set on full-on wank mode (and they sound way more like what I'd expect from Emerson than from Wakeman on a given Yes album), but I find myself drawn in more than I might like, and I'd have to give the track a thumbs up. The next two tracks ("Searching for Gold" and "The Loser") feature the only instances of vocals on the album (courtesy of the female choir), though they're mostly indecipherable apart from an occasional "Searching for gold" line (the line makes its way into both tracks, and an instrumental reprise of the theme can be found in a later track). "Searching for Gold" doesn't sound worse than a typical Six Wives track to me (perhaps with a little less direction, but there are some really lovely mellotron-sounding moments interspersed with other sounds), and "The Loser" has some really lovely piano parts (with other keyboards giving texture as needed).

Hitting the other tracks: "The Shoot" (which makes me think of skiing in the faster parts for some reason) has some goofy pseudo-honky-tonk parts interspersed with piano. "Lax'x" (what a strange name) is a bit of a bore in its "main" portion, but when the mellotron flutes come out I'm very happy, not to mention that the synth-driven reprise of the "Searching for Gold" part is surprisingly moving. Also, am I wrong in thinking that a lot of the last portion sounds awfully "Ritual"-esque? "After the Ball" is a very lovely, very tender piano-dominated piece (with synths coming in a little over a minute into it); "Montezuma's Revenge" is a goofy synth-reinvention of Gypsy music (which for whatever reason brings to my mind an image of miniature Krusty the Clowns quickly shooting up and down in a whack-a-mole game), and the closing "Ice Run" is surprisingly eerie and majestic (at least, if you're into cheeseball synth moods) in its first half before turning into a rather typical up-tempo solo Wakeman passage (it does have some Hammond, though, which hadn't been a Wakeman staple lately).

Honestly, there's probably no chance somebody who doesn't somehow already have this would ever listen to it; it's ridiculously out-of-print except as a Japanese import (and not even available on iTunes or other legal downloading sites), and I can hardly recommend putting a ton of effort into trying to seek it out. And yet, I can definitely say that this fits very well into my established pattern of listening to (most) 70's solo Wakeman as effective background music that's sporadically very entertaining. If you're incredibly curious, try to seek it out. It's no worse than his most famous albums, I think.

Whoa! This is a really good album! Honestly, I wasn't expecting a lot from this album, given that Steve's solo debut had been so unappealing and that Tormato, the last Yes album before this one, hadn't exactly captured Steve at a high point. This is better than Beginnings or Tormato by an incredible amount, though, and while it becomes clear as the album goes on that Steve Howe doesn't have quite the same potential as a solo artist as, say, Steve Hackett did, this album nonetheless shows that he was perfectly capable of making a good album on his own. Plus, I kinda admire the cojones required to draw parallels to one of Yes' best albums with the album title; this works every bit as well as a statement of purpose for Steve as The Yes Album did as a statement of purpose for his new band in 1971.

The biggest improvement for this album over the last one, without a question, is that Steve is almost silent as a singer, except for some understated, quiet vocals near the end of "All's a Chord," where they're almost an afterthought. In fact, the only other track with vocals is the side-one closer "Look Over Your Shoulder," where Steve employs the services of one Claire Hamill, who sounds so much here like Annie Haslam (of Renaissance fame) that I was convinced it was actually her the first few times I listened to this (until I looked it up and found out it wasn't). The track is a major highlight, by the way, with Claire giving a nice vocal part to an atmospheric rocker full of varied guitar work (the main theme of the album), pulsating bass (also done by Steve) and some powerful drumming from Alan White.

The rest of the album (all instrumental, except for the aforementioned snippet of Howe vocals) is all about showcasing all of the different guitar types and musical styles that struck Steve's fancy, and it's a major breath of fresh air after Tormato had him not sounding his very best (and after Beginnings tried so hard to be prog that it forgot to be good). My personal preference out of the lot is towards the opening "Pennants" (funny that I'd instinctually gravitate towards the tracks with White on drums even before I knew for sure it was him) which starts off on such a rocking note and with such a great guitar tone that I find myself utterly perplexed as to why he couldn't have had a sound like that on Tormato. The song's center is a rock one, held down by White's steady drumming and solid riffage, but it's a great showcase of ideas and themes for guitar and keys, and the variety of guitar sounds pulled out in this track is just fascinating. The variety peak, though, is definitely in the previously mentioned "All's a Chord" (with Moraz on keys and Bruford on drums) where Steve plays eight different kinds (!!) of guitar (to be fair, one is bass, but still) and creates something that works as much more than just a technique demonstration.

The rest of the album is a little background music-y, but I quite like it. The first half (all of the tracks so far mentioned are in the first half) is rounded out by "Cactus Boogie," a fun mix of banjo, Les Paul and pedal steel, and "Diary of a Man Who Vanished" is either really upbeat for a slightly sad number or really mournful for a cheerful number, but a winner either way. In the second half, I find my attention drifting some, but taken track by track, things here are fine. I would say that, if there's a clear mistake, it was in putting the 8-minute "Double Rondo," a decent mix of guitar meanderings with a string arrangement right before the closing cover of the 2nd movement of Vivaldi's "Concerto in D," only because the Vivaldi piece is soooo much better than what comes before it. Of the remaining three tracks, "Meadow Rag" is a fun bit of acoustic rag (I wouldn't want to hear a whole album of this kind of music necessarily, but having one an album is fine by me), "The Continental" is kinda jazzy and bluesgrassy (I guess), and "Surface Tension" is a good bit of acoustic Spanish guitar. Again, not essential listening, but all very nice.

Look, this may not quite be a great album, but it's definitely a very good album, and it's easily in the upper tier of Yes solo albums. Heck, I like it more than Fish Out of Water, and I'm pretty sure that puts me in a minority among fans who care about both. Anybody who's a fan of Steve as a guitarist (and really, why else would people be a fan of him?) should seek this out at some point.

And do you know what? It's not a truly terrible album, even if much of it feels every bit as dated as the worst aspects of BG did. What hurts this album most for me, honestly, is the singing; I can understand why somebody would enjoy Trevor's voice, but there's just something the sound of his voice that makes me associate every bad cliche of 80s rock vocals with it. I can listen to it solo in short stretches, and it's basically ok when it's working in harmony with Jon and Chris, but an entire album of Trevor in the lead is enough to drive me batty. Needless to say, the rating suffers a lot for the vocals problem.

So what about the music itself? Honestly, there's quite a bit of schlock, but there's also a surprising amount of good to be found. The most remarkable thing about it is that, aside from the drums and the backing vocals, this is quite literally a solo album; in addition to the guitars, Rabin was responsible for the bass, the keyboards, any other instruments thrown in, much of the vocal layering and a good amount of the production. Questions of taste preference aside, Trevor demonstrates that he's perfectly servicable in these other instruments and probably could have made a living playing any of them exclusively full time, so that has to mean something. But, ultimately, the guitar parts are Trevor's main focus, and this album is a pretty reasonable presentation of his skills. There are of course a lot of instances of Trevor playing hyper-technical 80s heavy metal wank that may show better raw chops than Howe did but not a third of the personality, and quite a few where he sounds fairly indistinguishable from many other highly trained 80s rock guitarists (especially in some of the "heavenly" moments). On the other hand, there are also a good number of stretches where Trevor shows the kind of beauty in his sound that he showed in some of his best Yes moments, and this kind of sound isn't something I've quite heard matched by others. This sound is wisely what Trevor chooses to emphasize in the beginning passage (and in some of the longer breaks) of the opening title track, and while the song itself is overlong and a little overblown for the melody quality, these instrumental breaks are enough to elevate the song to a good one on the whole. This song actually makes it easier to understand why people later tried to classify Talk as a Trevor Rabin solo album; the best aspects of the guitar playing here sound a lot like the best guitar playing in "I Am Waiting."

Beyond the first track, there's a lot of material that's uninteresting, overlong or both, but there's still some rather good stuff to be found here and there. "Promises," for instance, is slow and draggy in the verses, but I rather like the synth parts in the climactic moments of the song (they sound like the better parts of Power Windows), cheese-tastic they may be. "I Didn't Think it Would Last" embodies a lot of bad aspects of 80s music, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the descending melody before the chorus (the chorus has a lot of cheese, but it could be worse). "Hold On to Me" has a really awkward bridge, but the verses are surprisingly touching, and the chorus kinda sounds like one of the good ones on The Other Side of Life (this is nowhere near the highest compliment in the world, but that album has some good songs). And hey, the closing instrumental, "The Cape," kinda works in the same way Peter Gabriel's Security/Birdy-era music did, though certainly much cheerier.

Of course, there's a lot of material here I find very distasteful, which is the big reason this album can't get a higher grade. "Something to Hold on to" was a (very minor) hit single, but it's one of the most by-numbers pseudo-tough 80s pop songs I can imagine, and it actually makes "Love Will Find a Way" sound inspired and original. "Sorrow (Your Heart)" is pure 80s ethno-adult- pop cheese, "Cover Up" is a total bore except for some small bits of inspired pseudo-acosutic playing a la "I'm Running," and the list goes on. There are just too many moments that are more dramatic than warranted, and too many melodies that just don't match my taste whatsoever. But again: this is what I expected, and I'm more interested focusing on the parts that are contrary to my expectations. For an album that I bought as a joke, this could be worse.