Yes - Relayer

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Relayer_front_cover.jpg

I can't believe there isn't a thread dedicated to this album on here yet. After the (some would say) mis-step of Tales From Topographic Oceans and departure of Rick Wakeman, Yes recruited Patrick Moraz on keyboards and put together this record. While the album follows a similar structure to Closer To The Edge (an epic taking up all of side one, with two shorter compositions on side two), that's where the comparison with that album end. For me, this is the most violent-sounding Yes record and probably one of their most musically relentless. Sure, it's not for everybody (the band certainly take their playing to new heights of masturbatory delight on this record), but this seems to be the Yes album that I keep returning to.

So, Relayer: underappreciated classic or wanky, jazz-fusion mis-step?

should have been a poll, so everyone could challoppilly vote for Sound Chaser when TGOD is obv the best song (in their catalogue) (except, like, Awaken)

i can't listen to this

it comes off way less wanky than much other Yes on account of the violence, the intensity. prog is punk!

it took me years and years and years to fall for "to be over" - but after all, my soul surrendered. i no longer doubt my part. i am ready to be loved

This record is great- Moraz gets to be a little much, but it's Yes-- it's all a little much.

i appreciate some people don't like this album and i hope they enjoy fucking themselves

I'm not saying it's the best Yes album, but it's the one I'm most likely to listen to these days.

So were parts of TGOD recorded live in concert? I swear I hear folks cheering and whistling at one point (possibly during the guitar solo - maybe it's a solo recorded live and flown in Zappa-style?)

are you mixing it up with the Yesshows version in yr head?

that's just alan white hitting weird things i think?

Shocking that I agree with noodle vague and imago on something (nothing against those guys) but this right here is the best Yes album. Gates of Delerium is one if the more mind blowing musical experiences anybody can have.

Had to put the record on right now and re-listen...during the extended instrumental break...starts after the 9-minute mark and continues for a minute-plus. All these weird swirly swelling effects, sounding sometimes like wind, other times like a crowd whistling. I can't identify them at all! They don't sound like synth-effects. Weird.

that's just alan white hitting weird things i think?

― Who whom kissed? (imago), Saturday, June 14, 2014 1:00 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, there's a load of old car parts used as percussion in the battle section of 'The Gates Of Delirium', if I recall.

alan white hitting a rack of weird things, as i said. later he pushes it over :D

xp yeah exactly

Such a great album

...OK, I'm listening to all the percussion/backwards bits, but I don't think they start until after the sounds I'm talking about are all done with.

Think I'm starting to know how Tuomas must feel when he's obstinately arguing about something lol

this is maybe my favorite other than CTTE, depends on the day

I assume there is an unsearchable Yes albums poll with some dumb name?

There was an epics poll anyways.

Parts of "Delirium" are kinda reminding me of Utopia's "The Ikon" right now

I struggle to pick a personal favourite moment of 'The Gates Of Delirium', if only because the whole thing is so astounding. It's definitely my favourite of all the side-long Yes epics, and undoubtedly up there as one of my favourite Yes tracks ever. One part that keeps cropping up in my head is that uplifting bit at the end of the battle section, the piece of music before it goes into 'Soon'. Sublime.

yeah that is the best bit. when howe's guitar goes all seagull. that moment.

Yup, that's the bit!

Think I need to listen while high to properly appreciate/evaluate this one. I've never given it enough attention, obv.

Come to think of it, is 'The Gates Of Delirium' actually the most clear lyric that Anderson ever penned?

"South Side of the Sky" is fairly clear once you know the programmatic content

I struggle to pick a personal favourite moment of 'The Gates Of Delirium', if only because the whole thing is so astounding. It's definitely my favourite of all the side-long Yes epics, and undoubtedly up there as one of my favourite Yes tracks ever. One part that keeps cropping up in my head is that uplifting bit at the end of the battle section, the piece of music before it goes into 'Soon'. Sublime.

Yeah, that's the bit I mean. I just love the way it just explodes into that section!

I'm not a Wakeman fan, so _The Yes Album_ and _Relayer_ are the two best Yes records in my book. 'TGoD' is their best side-length track (all votes for 'CttE' will be counted).

I don't have the musical chops to describe my favorite part. This shit is a little too heavy for my limited musical vocabulary.

..OK, I'm listening to all the percussion/backwards bits, but I don't think they start until after the sounds I'm talking about are all done with.

i hear what you mean, round about 9'50 there's what sounds like a cheer and then there are sounds reminscent of whistles/high pitched crowd roar in the mix a few times during the next 30-40 seconds

btw keyboard voice of vengeful God at 12'50 is A+ keep it up fellas

Patrick Moraz used equipment which was still in prototype stage (for example, a Vako Orchestron, used for the string sounds throughout the album) to colour the sound effects on the instrumental/collage section of "The Gates of Delirium". For example, the whooping and wheezing sounds ("electric slinky") about midway through the track were created by one such synthesizer.

A+ research, thanks NV

My second favourite after CTTE.

I've always got the impression its one of those albums that is rated far higher by fans than critics or the band members. In the Classic Artists documentary I was disappointed how little talk or enthusiasm it generated but I know that the band consider "The Gates of Delirium" an important track. I'd even say that its one of those prog epics that dominates peoples memory of the album, like the other tunes were just bonus tracks.

I recall there being a really nondescript wishy washy review of this on AllMusicGuide (that may have changed by now) but fan polls and ratings consistently put it up among the top 4 Yes albums.

I love that cheering part.

Roger Dean's best cover art (his favourite too).

Yeah, I've often got that impression too. Aside from one or two mentions, I haven't really seen any of the band members involved go into detail about Relayer, and magazine articles tend to focus on The Yes Album, Fragile, Close To The Edge or Tales From Topographic Oceans when looking back at this band's discography. Yes fans and dedicated prog fans have always (more often than not) had great things to say about this album, but it seems to have weirdly fallen through the cracks critically.

OTM about Relayer having Dean's best cover art, too. Best seen on the original vinyl, obviously!

was gonna talk about how great this record felt just looking at the white and grey colour scheme on the cover whilst bringing it home on the bus

kinda annoyed with them for not doing more in this direction tbh

Me too in a way. There's portions of Going For The One that I like (and Moraz himself claims to have been involved in a large part of the writing of the album), but I definitely have never taken to it in the same way as I have with Relayer.

kinda annoyed with them for not doing more in this direction tbh

― Naamloze vennootschap (Noodle Vague), Saturday, June 14, 2014 4:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally otm.

Listened to TGOD last night. Definitely some of the most aggressive and weird stuff they've done.

As cool as it is, I can understand why they didn't continue down this path.

I guess the fact that they never tried to make another record like this just makes Relayer that bit more special. It definitely deserves to be ranked up with the more obvious classic Yes albums, though.

Came across this great interview with Eddy Offord, too, where Relayer gets covered alongside the other Yes albums he worked on.

TM: How would you compare the RELAYER sessions to the TALES sessions?

EO: It was a little better. Patrick came in and...Alan was the other thing. Alan had shared my penthouse apartment with me and it was actually me that got him into the band. I always felt that maybe Bill had lacked a little bit of soul or something, but had great technique. But Alan on the other hand had a lot of feel and soul, but not enough technique. When he first joined the band, it was tough, it was really hard for him...and then going into TALES with all of that uncertainty - the poor guy. It was really hard, it wasn't a solid situation. But having gone on tour and then coming back onto RELAYER - Rick had been on the outside for a long time anyway - so going into RELAYER Alan was more accepted and he was doing better and this crazy Swiss guy was coming in. It was actually quite nice, it was a better time.

TM: And that was another album that was recorded fairly quickly by Yes standards.

EO: It was, yeah. It was fairly short.

TM: How did you create the battle scene from the "Gates of Delirium"?

EO: I just remember all kinds of weird percussion things Jon brought in, metal sheets and so on. It was basically all created with percussion.

TM: Chris told me that they recorded this song thirty second to minute sections without even knowing what the end of the song would be. There had to be an element of luck along with skill, talent and inspiration.

EO: Yes, exactly. I'd say so!

TM: Steve mentioned that "To Be Over" is one of his favorite Yes songs of the moment. It has that majestic, symphonic sound Yes is known for.

EO: Yeah, it's nice.

TM: What was your impression of Patrick?

EO: I liked him a lot. But he had a hard time on the road. The biggest challenge of a keyboard player in those days was trying to stay in tune - that was the sign of a good keyboard player!

TM: All of those monophonic synthesizers going out...

EO: And the Mellotrons, Jesus! It took awhile for Patrick to get the older material down as well.

http://www.nfte.org/interviews/eo234.html

and from this interview with Rick Wakeman...

It was a good album, there's some good stuff on MAGNIFICATION, and I suppose to some extent... just to scoot back to the past, for example when I left after TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS and I heard RELAYER, I was actually pleased they did RELAYER the way that it turned out, because I listened to RELAYER and I thought there is no way I could have contributed to that album, because musically that's not on my wavelength at all, so I was really pleased. I know it sounds stupid, but I was really pleased how RELAYER came out, because that was the direction the band was moving, and I'm really pleased, because I had definitely made a right decision, because I couldn't have contributed anything to RELAYER. If however the next album after TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS had been GOING FOR THE ONE, I would have been extremely pissed off (laughs), because I can understand that direction, you know what I mean?

http://www.nfte.org/interviews/rw263.html

Bands used to have a much more compressed history. Yes 71' to '74 went through a pretty astounding amount of changes in a really just a four year period. It's a rare band now even in more underground indie circles that would put out that wide an array of records with key lineup changes and stylistic experiment in such a small period of time. And these guys did it while playing a ton of shows in US/Europe. I suppose if that is considered, it's not hard tor see why perhaps a project like Topographic Oceans might go sideways, there just wasn't real time to get such a big project together. And even when that happened they just swapped out one of the main writers and kept on trucking. I think perhaps laying that much music out including a double live studio and live record may have had Relayer get a short listen in all the smoke.

Compare that to a more modern prog type band like Tool, who have did four albums (albeit longer length) in 13 years with none in the 8 to follow, yet have toured in the interim.

...and all their albums sound the same ;)

plus 2 or 3 of the key Yes guys appear to be unbelievable douches with not much interest in teamwork

Amazing what Googling turns up. While searching around the net trying to find out more about the album, I came across a university dissertation someone wrote about the album

it took me years and years and years to fall for "to be over" - but after all, my soul surrendered. i no longer doubt my part. i am ready to be loved

― reggie (qualmsley), Friday, June 13, 2014 11:45 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I didn't take me years to fall for it, but I do remember the first few times I listened to this album through, I kinda wanted the same vibe as the previous two tracks to continue. But definitely now, I think the relative calm of 'To Be Over' is necessary to the album. It ends the album on a really uplifting note.

This one is top 3 for me (along with Fragile and Close to the Edge); one of those albums that seems crazier every time you hear it. "Sound Chaser" is the one that always makes my jaw drop, particularly in the way they take that sort of demented funk riff (could be Parliament if it had like five less notes) and just toy around with it in all sorts of ways, breaking it all the way down, then speeding up into oblivion, playing it on every instrument (including CHA CHA CHAAA CHA CHA!!), and so on. But really this whole album is brilliant and a great capper on the one-of-a-kind run that Yes had from 71 to 74. I know I'm cynical about these guys a lot but I try not to forget just how wonderful and trailblazing they were in those years, even Tales is pretty damn great if you ignore the baggage and just listen. I do find it funny that despite Yes releasing some two dozen live albums in their career that they hardly hit these songs at all, it's almost as if they're too difficult to actually play live.

XP - To my ear they absolutely did take elements of Relayer onto Going For The One, To Be Over and parts of TGOD have echoes in Awaken and Turn Of The Century with the band moving those big blocked out chord sections around like tectonic plates.

But if you're talking about the fusion-y edge as a consequence of PM's input, I don't buy the notion that it's as big a part of Relayer as is accepted, I don't really hear that much Mahavishnu or whoever beyond the intro to Soundchaser and a lot of the time Moraz's choice of textures and sounds are strikingly similar to Wakeman's.

Yeah, I was talking more about the more aggressive approach of 'Sound Chaser' and most of 'The Gates of Delirium', rather than the softer side of the LP. Wasn't most of this album written before Patrick Moraz had even joined the band?

i hate the rhino remaster of this album and definitely prefer the earlier cd, though I don't love that mastering either. Will I love the wilson edition?

Don’t know if you’ll love it but it sounds way better

It's less crunchy

Bands used to have a much more compressed history. Yes 71' to '74 went through a pretty astounding amount of changes in a really just a four year period. It's a rare band now even in more underground indie circles that would put out that wide an array of records with key lineup changes and stylistic experiment in such a small period of time. And these guys did it while playing a ton of shows in US/Europe. I suppose if that is considered, it's not hard tor see why perhaps a project like Topographic Oceans might go sideways, there just wasn't real time to get such a big project together. And even when that happened they just swapped out one of the main writers and kept on trucking. I think perhaps laying that much music out including a double live studio and live record may have had Relayer get a short listen in all the smoke.

― earlnash, Sunday, June 15, 2014 3:55 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This absolutely freaks me out. The Yes Album, Fragile, CTTE, Tales, AND Relayer - over a period of only 3.75 years!!!!!!!!!????????
What the fuuuck!? Who ARE these guys? (I cannot even maintain a semblance of sense when even thinking about it)

When I am amidst a heavy work assignment, thinking, "I just gave them a Tableau dashboard 9 months ago!", and get a little too unruly, I put on "Soon", and remind myself that in the same 9-month span in the early '70s, Yes would already have recorded an awesome record with a side-long epic which, a few months after buying it it, will make millions of people tear up when the damn title is referenced!

It's rad to see all of the love for TGOD on here (I love Jon's description of the song on the YesYears doc, "They must have thought I was crazy, banging on the piano, screaming da-DA da-DA..." - it's worth the 20 buck for the VHS version alone)

Also, if loving the "cha-cha-cha...cha-cha..." part of "Sound Chaser" is wrong, I don't wanna be right!

Holy shit this Wilson mix sounds amazing!!!!

Yeah the Wilson mix is gorgeous. Gave me newfound respect for Moraz's playing.

his mixes def get slagged off by some purists but I quite like them; good alternates for the earlier albums, and IMO definitive for Relayer.

this kid gets it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbQlgKqkHug&feature=emb_logo

Playback error

i hope this works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbQlgKqkHug&t=15s

fuck. i'll try one more time. it's worth it!

https://youtu.be/PbQlgKqkHug

21 minutes of sweet cream, bitch

It was a lot of fun watching this kid go on this journey

do sound chaser next!!

Yep, shit is srt8 fire

that was awesome, very wholesome

Yes are touring this next year, but I can guarantee that it won't be fire. It might be passably ok though.

dunno if I've posted this in this thread before but I'm gonna post again because holy shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqR0AP7A_l4

When the pedal steel hits in To Be Over, I'm flying

so over xmas staying w/ny sister in hastings we met up for the evening w/her oldest friend, who she was at school with in the mid-70s and stayed close to ever since — she’s one of my oldest friends too, we all arrived london at the same time and looked after one another in those long-ago days. and we talked abt all of that — including memories of the time the three of us and others (probably her older sister, certainly her older brother, who was driving; a couple of others long forgotten) drove from shrewsbury to stafford in june 1977 to see YES at fabled 70s mega-venue the BINGLEY HALL: the GOING FOR THE ONE tour

anyway since I am spending the weekend packing up the flat I have lived in for 32 years to leave the quarter I have known for 40, and bcz I was therefore in a melancholy and backward-looking mood, I spent 20 mins hunting out and then jigsawing together, on spotify, the setlist for that show, from the relevant albs — my actual-real first rock SPECTACLE. a thing that amuses is that you can now go onto the internet and discover exactly what some act played, and in what order, 46 years ago…

• support act was donovan! (no one cared and the crowd was restive 😔)
• set design was by roger dean! (it was meant to be elfin caves but it looked like torn multi-coloured tights 😔)
• and I quite enjoyed it — tho as always w/music probably as much for the social element as the sound. I had schoolfriends who LOVED yes but they weren’t with us and I was p unfamiliar with the new material. probably I enjoyed the banter in the car there and back as much as the show tbh. we had a giant shopping bag full of ham and chutney sandwiches!

anyway it’s what I’ve been listening to all weekend so here’s a youtube of the actual live material of that tour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9kdRt5bUvA

is this music good or not? i don't know!! patrick moraz possibly wrote more of it than historians allow! routine wakeman deprecation inserted here (he was on-stage in his dumb cape) (everyeone else was in a cape also i think but they looked good not dumb) (here bcz a turrican thread abt a difft alb seems the right place for it)

lol

given a certain poppy zip in parts of GFtO (title track especially) i'm about to attribute as much as possible to Moraz

i feel like moraz (?) was shunting howe a *long* way out of his too-pretty too-fey comfort zone: i never hate how but he's often p wild on this youtube (and of course on GFtO title track) -- i remember he was jerking the steel pedal around on-stage like crazy haha

(which is maybe why he agitated for moraz to get the boot) (howe also a bit of a dick when it comes to teamplay, if the oral histories are a guide)

there's a reason Relayer sounds like they opened a door to wonderful possibilities and then CERTAIN MEMBERS slammed that door shut toot sweet

(it was all of the members except Moraz lol)

i think this tour they were relatively on the same page but next album tormato sowed the seeds of destruction, howe and wakeman and his dumb biotron or whatever it was were filling up every possible space on jon's increasingly twee songs and the sides were drawn. the moraz period plus the yes/buggles version really deserved a second album. i believe the yesshows album documents that tour you saw and some before and after. the funniest thing to me is comparing squire's still proggy outfits in this period to his new wave skinny tie fit on the drama tour

it's been too long, i'd forgotten what a stone cold banger Parallels is as a set opener

dave q on tormato lest we forget: The 120 Days of Shameless Bids for Publicity!

i love moraz on relayer but he had the wrong style for the wakeman stuff when they played the hits live (as they always did). weirdly white was bad at what made bruford great and he was much more accepted, anti-swiss discrimination or some such

"he had the wrong style for the wakeman stuff" = not content to play 30 mins of pisspoor filler arpeggios during the solo spots 😂🤣

(tbf tho i hate him -- rightly and justifably -- everyone is p on point live chops-wise at this time, not always the case by any means)

the tension between the spacey open vocal on the chorus of Parallels and the vroom vroom of the bass says this is maybe Yes's grooviest era

i mean playing in the style of the records, that wembly (?) or big london show they did on the relayer tour, moraz sounds bad on the old stuff but the sound system at the gig was dire tbf. i really like moraz on record, i'm neutral to wakeman in his first go round with yes but yeah he def got worse as the years went on

somewhere (presumably on ilx) i read that moraz had great difficulty staying in tune live -- which is an equipment issue of course not strictly a chops issue -- which wd def fvck up the many passages of keyb sound-colour in the hits, plus of course the fans will always be rise-of-skywalker abt the songs they feel they know and own

as with wembley, bingley hall is also a huge hollow echoey space but i wasn't remotely competent to judge such matters at the time and in fact don't recall this aspect of things one bit

I'll take Wakeman's live fiddly arpeggios over Moraz' "squeeeeee!!" pitch wheel fusionisms. Though I like both keyboardists fine in Yes.

ACAC (all capes are cool)

i listened to a fair amount of the relayer tour live shows this afternoon and
(i) yes there are definitely tuning problems tho it's hard to pin down who's causing them
(ii) moraz has a jazzy tuning palette at figners end that definitely fvcks with anderson's and howe's normal pretty-chords zone of engagement (the kind of thing that can be kept tidy in the studio bcz there you can add the keybs late in the mix)

#notallcapes

Moraz probs would have worked better with Broof on drums. Yesshows is the best live albums of theirs don't you think? Who the hell is doing the weird yelps during the freak out part of Ritual Nu Sommes De Solei!?!

i only started down this long road yesterday -- i do not yet have well developed opinions!

im only really discussing patrick moraz bcz this is the relayer thread and i feel it is incumbent on us all

Yesshows is great, always assumed White was the yelper but i have nothing to back this up

anderson's and howe's normal pretty-chords zone of engagement

That's not entirely fair, they wrote "The Ancient" on Tales, and the weird cadenza in the middle of "Sound Chaser" is 100% Howe.

Wow this remastered footage!!! (With Moraz)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeEqWLpcwiY

hell yeah, that is awesome. are there any full shows out there with Moraz? I don't think anything was released officially but there's probably a good quality boot out there. I did recently see a cool video of him soloing at the end of "Long Distance Runaround" and he plays a lot of quotes from the Refugee album. it's really neat. wonder how many in attendance recognized what he was doing.

That whole QPR show is on YouTube it's AWESOME

wow yeah you aren't kidding. what a crazy setlist too. Moraz definitely has his hands full.

I hope the entire QPR set gets remastered by this dude. Great job!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz3jBBKSkTk

dope af