Tragedy strikes the progressive-rock scene yet again, and once more it is Yes at fault. The Ship of Theseus-like band has had so many membership changes and extra parts fitted, it’s hard to hear what their niche is anymore. What does this band do better than others? Name value alone is keeping the machine whirring, though even the most dedicated of listeners are preparing to evacuate. Heaven & Earth is a dire fall from grace, crushingly so after what was a very enjoyable preceding album. Fly From Here is the best Yes album since Drama, and it would not take long for the wheels to fall off. They couldn’t build on critical momentum at the best of times, why start decades on from when Fragile was relevant? So bad it isn’t even on streaming services, Heaven & Earth is given the That Mitchell and Webb Situation treatment. Mildly forgotten work, which is easily available on YouTube, copyright law be damned.
Good thing Heaven & Earth isn’t on streaming. More people would be aware of this cowardly album, otherwise. All the worst parts of Yes but amplified. Steve Howe holds the group back from recording for fear they do not have enough for an audience so soon after Fly From Here. How right he was. That 2011 release is solid work from Yes, and it’s so far their most recent, listenable work. Heaven & Earth is an unfortunately flat experience. Consistently underwhelming. Howe should have held out a bit longer but with new vocalist Jon Davidson needing to prove himself in the studio, time to record an album comes far sooner than needed. He hits the higher notes necessary and that’s good enough. But the material presented to him across Heaven & Earth is miserable. A little too high a pitch on opener, Believe Again, means the work is not just poorly written, but piercing too. It’d be less painful to have a drill bit lodged in your ear, burrowing closer and closer to the mush inside your skull.
Still it’d be better to scrape the paste of your brain from the carpet than listen to numbing songs like Step Beyond. In a chase for pop catchiness, Yes leaves all those rusted tools which provided at least recognisable results in the past at the studio door. They bring in an instrumental arrangement, specifically the keyboard, which would be better suited to the woeful speaker system found in those bowling alley conversions with sticky floors and broken arcade machines. To Ascend doesn’t get all that far off the ground either. Typically light and ultimately loose instrumental work which is only of interest to the diehard Yes fan, who will nod along to just about anything the band struggles to release. Truly brilliant nonsense from the band here, with Yes incapable of offering anything refreshing.
Light work does not have to be weightless, but Yes are in awful form here. Heaven & Earth was such a brutally poor album the band simply acted as though it doesn’t exist. They returned to Fly From Here soon after, the first wise decision made by Yes this century. Adding Davidson to the line-up is fine enough, but all he does is pad out what long-term listeners will have been wanting, which is a continuation of all things uninteresting. Gone are the progressive rock contributions Yes could make even in their darkest moments, and in is an empty collection of songs. Light of the Ages and It Was All We Knew are unforgivable, the latter especially as it hints at the guitar-led flourishes of the old times. No such luck for those wanting it though. Heaven & Earth is one of the many misfires from Yes.
