Yes (2009)

For maybe 20 years now I've been in a kind of limbo with the Pet Shop Boys. I suspect most people still think of them as an '80s act, if not a one-hit wonder ("West End Girls," in spite of five more hits that followed in the US and many more internationally). I traveled deep into their catalog until approximately the 1996 album Bilingual, lingering very long and very hard on the Very Relentless package. I've always had a listen since then, even following the singles and B-sides and such (even that Battleship Potemkin thing), but little has ever insinuated itself again the way the work did of a golden period from 1987 to 1994. The closest I came was probably "The Night I Fell in Love," a brilliant shot across the bow to Eminem on the 2002 album Request, which I otherwise lost track of a week or two later. This pattern applied to Yes. When it came out I said Maybe and then the whole thing slipped my mind. So this is a story of one of those happy returns, a phenomenon I think I've seen with novels more than music. I try to read it, I try to read it, I try to read it—multiple attempts across years or even decades. Then one day I pick it up again and it's the best thing I've ever read. Yes is the best Pet Shop Boys album I've heard in a long time and just now I'm thinking the best of the 21st century.

This occurred to me a couple years ago, so the judgment has also turned out to be resilient. Is it really the upbeat positive note of the title? The music certainly pursues such avenues, albeit with their usual wryly detached irony. The opener, "Love etc." sets the tone, insisting you need love. The football chants on the chorus are relentless: "you need more you need more you need more you need more." I think they would find a way to make it say "sex" if that's what they meant. "All Over the World" follows on with a gorgeous takeoff that floats above the planet and marches into dignity accompanied by alien space gun sounds. It's beautiful and full of love etc.: "Exciting and new to say I want you." "Beautiful People," next, is not about the externality, though incapable of laying it on the "inner beauty" line. Still, that's what I hear in the chorus: "I want to live like beautiful people, give like beautiful people, with like beautiful people around." That sounds clannish and like Utopia at once. "Did You See Me Coming?" works because the arrogance of the title and play of the lyrics is belied by the ripening chest swoon of the melody, which somehow grows into a terribly sweet monster of sincerity. "Vulnerable" runs in place with the theme and may sound too much like a type of Pet Shop Boy song, i.e., product. Yet, for all that, the singer (as played, as usual, by Neil Tennant) is "so vulnerable," pleading his case. "More Than a Dream" might be long, but hits sweet spots of its own within the vibe. Even at their worst, the Pet Shop Boys are always at least as good as the pop Al Stewart, a firm floor for their entire career. "Building a Wall" is another song that may feel like reworking, but the twist on Brian Wilson's "In My Room" is fine: "not so much to keep you out, more to keep me in." Then "King of Rome" is more familiar territory ("My October Symphony," "To Speak Is a Sin," "The Samurai in Autumn"), but it's very beautiful territory. I could put down roots here—maybe I have. "Pandemonium" is a rave-up, standard issue, working to stoke the mood. If I'm really into it this is usually good for a minute or two of irresistible dancing with any cat handy.

The weakest songs follow, as if Pet Shop Boys Chris Lowe and Tennant were exhausted with the good times and/or already looking ahead. "The Way It Used to Be" and "Legacy" are the only songs here that pull some shades of self-pity around themselves, prefiguring Elysium. I still try to pay track sequencing some respects. At least there's the convenience that they're easily cut off when listening straight through. Otherwise, Yes tracks 1 to 9 are just the best thing going.

Yes, "Roundabout" (1972)

March 4, 1972, #13
(listen)

In high school daze I occupied an uncomfortable ground between an increasing interest in album artists and their very long jam-oriented exercises, toward which all the cool kids were gravitating, and an increasingly helpless adoration of the embarrassing pop music still playing on the AM radio. I may have mentioned this before. It was always very exciting and convenient for me whenever the worlds came together and acts such as the Allman Brothers, Edgar Winter, and Focus began making random inroads. So if, over the long years, I finally had to say no to Yes, I still haven't forgotten how exciting and indeed gratifying it was to hear a band I loved on my stereo at home cracking the top 40 and making it on the radio. In necessarily shortened version, per the usual. As a purist I am pointing to the full-on 8:36 album track (those without the extra five minutes can find the bowdlerized single version here). It's full of all their usual musicianly charms, the fluid walloping bass of Chris Squire (arguably the band's single best feature) is as defined and integral as Rick Wakeman's rippling keyboard and Steve Howe's politely marauding electric guitar. No one then or now knows what singer Jon Anderson is getting up to in the words. "The lyrics are obscure," Wikipedia helpfully informs, "and have been the subject of debate on music discussion sites." Interestingly, when "the subject of debate on music discussion sites" is googled, the only thing returned are variations on the Wikipedia article about "Roundabout." Remarkable how prescient the title and analysis of the lyrics are in this regard.

Close to the Edge (1972)

I'm pretty sure the general consensus on Yes is that Fragile is the best album they did, with maybe The Yes Album in there too, though I suspect there's another quarter who would argue for Tales From Topographic Oceans, a double LP with four songs. I like Fragile, I never warmed to Tales (and I have nothing to say about the '80s comeback, except I did kind of like that hit). Close to the Edge, the album that came between, was the one I owned and was fanatical about for a time, a daily habit even, mostly for the side-long title song, although I thought the flip was worth the time too when I was in the mood for more where that came from. But I was done with it more years ago than I like to think. So I approached it again recently with some trepidation. Boy howdy what do you know, it still sounds terrific. Visiting Wikipedia, I am reminded that two of its three tracks, including the long one, are presented as suites composed of titled sections: "The Solid Time of Change," "Total Mass Retain," "Seasons of Man," "Cord of Life," and like that. I probably didn't need to remember that, because it only emphasizes the silly pretensions of a lot of the progressive-rock I consciously walked away from. But it doesn't mean even so that there isn't a good deal of soul and energy and imagination incorporated here, not to mention a good groove once in awhile, and always a kind of sincerely felt yearning after transcendence. I am also seeing that the long one has something to do with Hermann Hesse and one or another of his novels, but the thing is they really could get it worked out on the musical plane and that's the level on which it operates still. In fact, setting aside all the ponderous conceptual hippie (or post-hippie) shtick is not hard at all with the thing playing. As far as I can tell it's a real band working things out the way real bands do—rehearsing, jamming, locking up with one another, and knowing what they're all about all the way from the inside, each connected equally to all the others, and then just playing until it comes together. I mean, it's possible that what I'm hearing is a sentimental hit of nostalgia, re-embracing with an album I remember well loving, and all the memories and lost youth and all that associated with it. Or, on the other hand, maybe it's just a really good album.