Yes - Close to the Edge
On September 8, 1972, "Yes" released "Close to the Edge" in the United Kingdom, the band's fifth studio album. The album was release On September 13, 1972 in the United States.
This is the album where everything "Yes" had built up to that point came together into an almost perfect work, where virtuosity, melody, complexity, spirituality and adventurousness sound as if there had never been any contradiction between them. For many, it is not only one of the band's peaks, but one of the high points of progressive rock as a whole.
A year earlier, it was already clear that something very special was happening with "Yes". "The Yes Album" effectively saved the band's career, while "Fragile" introduced the classic lineup of Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman and Bill Bruford, and established "Yes" as one of the most important bands in progressive rock. After the "Fragile" tour, the five musicians arrived at "Advision" Studios in London with enormous confidence and the sense that they no longer had to prove that complex music could work in front of an audience. Now they wanted to see just how far they could take it.
The recording sessions, together with producer and engineer Eddy Offord, became an almost engineering exercise. The band did not simply record pieces from beginning to end. Sections were recorded separately, tape was physically cut and spliced, loops were built by hand, and ideas went through countless changes until they found the right place. This was an era before a computer could fix an edit with a mouse click. Moving a section meant taking a blade to the tape and trusting that you were not ruining music you had spent days building.
The process also came at a cost. Bruford felt that by the end of it he had already given the band everything he could. Even before the album was released, he announced his departure for "King Crimson". In hindsight, it is hard to imagine a more fitting album for a farewell. Bruford left at the exact moment this lineup reached its peak.
The album opens with "Close to the Edge". This is not simply a long composition, but an entire world compressed into almost 19 minutes and four sections. The sounds of water, birds and nature gradually move closer until they are swallowed by a musical storm. Howe's guitar is thrown forward, Bruford's drums refuse to settle into a simple path, Squire's bass almost functions as another guitar, and Wakeman fills every space with organ, Mellotron and Moog. Instead of an introduction that prepares the listener, "Yes" simply throws us into deep water.
Anderson and Howe began developing the piece toward the end of the "Fragile" tour. Anderson was deeply influenced at the time by Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha", and the book's spiritual journey seeped into the lyrics. That is why looking for a conventional story here is difficult. The words work more like a sequence of images, ideas and states of consciousness, while the music moves between chaos, calm, transcendence and a return to the starting point.
The high point arrives in the section "I Get Up I Get Down". After the instrumental assault, everything almost comes to a halt. The vocal harmonies float in the air, and Wakeman's huge church organ turns the studio into a cathedral. He recorded the organ separately at "St Giles-without-Cripplegate" in London, after which the recording had to be integrated into the master. When Wakeman's Moog breaks out of the silence and returns the piece to "Seasons of Man", it feels like emerging from darkness into light.
After a journey like that, it is almost impossible to open the second side of the record without sounding smaller. Then "And You and I" arrives and proves that "Yes" had more than one way to reach the summit at the time.
The piece began as a much simpler idea, almost an acoustic folk song, but gradually grew into four sections and a symphonic work of more than ten minutes. The opening on Howe's 12-string guitar is one of the most beautiful moments recorded in progressive rock. Even the opening harmonics he plays were originally an improvisation before the take, but Offord liked the moment and kept it in the recording. From there the piece keeps opening up, while Wakeman's keyboards lift the simple melody into something almost orchestral.
This is precisely where it becomes clear that the album is great not because of its complexity, but because of what the band does with it. "And You and I" does not try to impress us with the number of time-signature changes. It simply moves us. The acoustic and electric guitars move alongside each other, the bass and drums know when to disappear and when to bring the piece back to earth, and Anderson's voice sounds as if it rises a little higher above the band each time. It is one of those moments when the band's enormous technical ability stops being the point, and only the music remains.
The album closes with "Siberian Khatru", the shortest track on the album, if an almost nine-minute piece can be called "short". After the two large-scale works before it, "Yes" sounds more direct, heavier and above all more rhythmic here. The jagged guitar riff drives the piece forward, Bruford and Squire turn the rhythm into a playground, and Wakeman adds Mellotron and a harpsichord solo that brings an almost Baroque color into progressive rock.
Roger Dean also reached a turning point here in his work with the band. The front cover is almost minimalist, a gradual fade from green to black, but opening the record sleeve reveals a world of cliffs, islands, water and imaginary landscapes. Just as importantly, "Close to the Edge" was the first album to feature the famous "Yes" logo, and from that moment it became difficult to separate Dean's visual world from the band's music.
Bruford's departure could have broken the band apart at its greatest moment, but Alan White stepped in and the band set out on a major tour to promote the album. Commercially, the risk paid off. "Close to the Edge" reached No. 3 in the United States and No. 4 in the United Kingdom, and later went platinum in the US. An album with only three tracks, with no real attempt to tailor itself to radio, became one of the band's most successful and important records.
In 2025, the album was given new life with a Super Deluxe edition that included a new remaster, rarities and previously unreleased recordings, alongside new Steven Wilson mixes in stereo, 5.1 and Dolby Atmos. The fact that, more than five decades after the sessions, new layers are still being opened up within these three pieces says a great deal about the depth they contain.
Ultimately, "Close to the Edge" is not simply one of the great albums by "Yes". It is one of those records that explains why progressive rock came into being in the first place. Not to write longer pieces, and not to show how fast musicians could play, but to take everything rock, classical music, jazz, technology and imagination could offer and build something that had not existed before.
Three tracks, less than 38 minutes and almost no wasted moment. "Yes" came so "close to the edge" here that for years afterward almost every prog band tried to understand how it managed not to fall over it.
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