Yes – Aurora Review

Too much of a good thing implies there was much of a good thing to begin with. Yes has staggered on with none of the original members and even less of a reputation. Their work from the mid-1970s onward has been nothing short of disastrous. From Rick Wakeman and company falling in and out of favour with themselves, their bandmates, and the charts, to a general sense of trying to repeat the success they had with Time and a Word, and, to a lesser extent, Relayer, the group has struggled on. It’s been a bit of an embarrassing stretch of albums. Three years on from the abysmal Mirror to the Sky comes Aurora, a Steve Howe-led project that dares to ask how much worse the band can get. Quite, is the answer. An hour with modern-day Yes is to spend an hour with whatever the audible equivalent of waterboarding is. There’s no way Aurora can hide behind the legacy of the name attached to the project because that was squandered right around Tormato and has gotten worse from there. That, as well as Aurora, is not Howe’s fault.  

He’s blameless but knows there’s an appetite for Yes and their work. But to keep the contemporary machine looking sleek and shiny, there must be a sacrifice. An hour of your time, in this instance. Is Watching the River Roll just an excuse for Howe to plant a Bob Dylan cover onto a Yes album? No, thankfully. But the opening, title track makes you wish it were, it’d act as a palette cleanser then. Second single and second song Turnaround Situation is a space-age dud. Marginally better than Aurora, but a kick in the shin is better than a bullet in the skull, after all. Repeating the title of the track as the new iteration of Yes tries to adapt what they think made the band such a success in its heyday, is rough listening. An instrumentally cobbled-together endeavour which has no aim beyond being a taster session for their abilities as musicians. They can play, that much is undeniable. But they cannot play convincingly.  

Surrealism had always suited Yes when they got it right. Fragile and even parts of Drama back in 1980 showcased that. But, from there, the band has fallen to pieces as they try and turn their flowery and often shallow writing into grand projections of the future. They’ve not once succeeded, and with every album they release this century, they sound further from their goal. Jon Davison is solid as needs be but he can only work with the material handed to him. Howe, for all his experience in the studio, has struggled to break from this current, underwhelming sound. There’s a sense of protecting that Yes sound, whatever it is since it changed every album, as did the band’s members. Aurora feels a bit too superfluous to work as a charmed and flowing piece. Songs like Love Lies Dreaming extend the Yes discography for the sake of it. Clanging cymbals, a clawing attempt at dragging out meaning from a song that sounds as though its title was written first, it’s an inarticulate and messy listen because Yes is a band that impresses what it can do, not what it should do.  

An instrumental cacophony is only as impressive as the echo pinging through it. Basics are what Howe and the band offer lyrically, and as a result, the accompanying instrumentals, as jam-like and off-the-cuff as they may sound, feel redundant. The eleven-minute Countermovement is an example of that flair for the theatrics, but an inability to centre the spotlight on anything new. Yes has dared not go further than Howe allows, and it’s a limiting, frustrating listen. There are four moments where Countermovement could end comfortably, but Yes has given into its pastiche and is now searching for these long, contemplative rock epics. They’ve yet to pull a solid one together this century. Davison struggles on Ariadne, too, and the songs to follow that are the same mixture of instrumental shortcomings, hollow lyrics, and a frontman trying to recapture the band’s glory days, whatever they were. Aurora is a mess. This is no natural display. This is manufacturing the name of a band that has had a now forty-six-year break from releasing an interesting album.