Ladder

The 1999 release from Yes. Highlights on this album include "The Ladder", "If You Only Knew", and "The Messenger".

Thirty years and a dozen-plus personnel changes after it helped launch the English progressive rock movement, Yes bills The Ladder as a "return to form." The question is: Which form? Though opening with a sound wash and rhythmic sleight-of-hand that suggests Close to the Edge and Tales from Topographic Oceans, it soon becomes apparent that the reunited core of the band's early 70's prime (vocalist Jon Anderson, bassist Chris Squire, guitarist Steve Howe, drummer Alan White, augmented by Billy Sherwood and Igor Khoroshev on guitar and keyboard, respectively) has remembered a thing or two from Yes's metamorphosis into a pop hit-maker ("Owner of a Lonely Heart") in the 1980s without sacrificing their willingness to occasionally take their music effortlessly off the wall. (Economic adventure, if you will.) The band takes playful, virtuosic swipes at Afro-Cuban percussion, as well as jazz, funk, and classical, and even concocts an unlikely tribute to Bob Marley that sounds about as reggae-fied as, well, Yes. And if their utopian-counterculture lyrical bent remains unbowed, it now seems like a spit in the face of the overarching cynicism of the age. --Jerry McCulley