MIRROR TO THE SKY

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Sure, their albums are amazing, but that’s because they can actually play all that crazy shit live too.

Nonetheless, Graff wrote the album "gives us every reason to hope this is the beginning of a prolific new era for the band. They started with two ideas for songs that they wanted to turn into longer pieces, which became the 13-minute track "Mirror to the Sky" and the 9-minute "Luminosity". YES received unconditional support from InsideOut boss Thomas Waber, who encouraged them to keep going in the studio, months before The Quest would even go on sale. Steve Howe’s still with the band, though he did have a 16-year absence from the band from 1981-1997.Speaking of bonus tracks, the second disk (featuring just three more songs) does not contribute all too much to the overall experience of the album, the songs there are in the same vein as the ones on the main disk, just more forgettable and repetitive. When we delivered everything, and they were just getting the vinyl and everything into production for manufacturing, we were still very much in that creative zone,” explains Steve Howe. The autoharp and acoustic guitar embellishments aren’t great, making this intro a bit of a mixed bag.

So, 50 years or so since they first recorded, Yes - or at least the 2023 iteration of the group - are back with their latest offering, Mirror To The Sky. I am sure I am not the only one who groaned when I realised there was a new Yes album being released.All Connected comes off a little ordinary to begin with, but there so much to it and now sometimes I go straight to that song first. As they were wrapping up The Quest, YES found themselves with song sketches, structures, and ideas that were demanding attention. By making a second disc, the band is making a principled artistic statement: disc one is the album and disc two has the bonus tracks.

I was not particularly impressed with the first single, and the fact that this is another of those stupid disc-and-a-half money-grab releases also didn’t do much to give me hope. This one is by no means able to foreshadow the band's all-time classics from the 70s and the 80s, but is a great exercise in trying to recapture that joyful and affirming spark of creativity that has always been associated with the name of Yes. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Howe’s guitar playing is as expected, decorating the album with filigree runs on numerous guitars; Billy Sherwood’s bass playing is so good you’d swear the late, great Chris Squire was still around. Similarly later on in this song where some acoustic guitar in the right speaker seems too high in the mix.A major update arrived in the March 2023 edition of Prog magazine, which featured an interview with Howe who spoke about the album. The band had boldly proclaimed themselves masters of the album craft, and I could by no means oppose such a statement, as 'Mirror to the Sky' is a well-written, finely composed and recorded album, working pretty well as one, too. The legacy of Yes surely lives on, and 'Mirror to the Sky' is a good album that aims to point out exactly this! A good song, Steve Howe is just as good as ever, however, I must mention one downfall of the album, and it is a MAJOR pitfall.