I blame the album cover. Once I saw it as a kid, I knew I had to have a copy of this. It was cold and clinical, and somehow a tad intimidating. It definitely wasn’t warm and welcoming. For possibly the first time, I was seeing something that was obviously put to paper without the direct touch of a human hand. Here was something all hard edges and perfect curves, instead of the band’s legendary Roger Dean album covers which were all rounded hand-drawn, soft, blobby shapes. Here was a cover that marked a clear line in the sand from what preceded it in their catalog.
That is appropriate as Yes, the band in question, had actually split up two years before the album 90125 was recorded. After the separation, three members formed a new outfit named Cinema. Two other former members were intrigued and decided to retrofit the material to be released under the Yes banner. One of those two latecomers on this 1983 project was a keyboardist they fired way back in 1971.
Looking at this album objectively, I believe it is the worst record I genuinely love. It definitely is the only holdover from my pre-teens to my adult years, as I discarded almost everything before the one-two punch of puberty and discovering The Beatles. I used to be fan of fucking Styx, for crying out loud, and that is a singularly useless band. And Duran Duran suddenly didn’t seem that good anymore, either, or maybe I just finally made the mistake of reading their lyrics.
Not that Yes has much to crow about on that front. The lyrics are printed on the inner sleeve and they…are not great. At best, they resort to platitudes and rather vacuously encouraging statements. Songs with titles like “Hold On” and “It Can Happen” tell you all you need to know about the lyrical content. “Our Song” might have been a state of the union for the band (who would go on to record an album actually titled Union) but it is instead simply an acknowledgement they are a band, and this is a song, and they are performing it now. It might as well have been titled “Yes Song”. Perhaps the weirdest track is “City Of Love”, which I swear is about cruising for prostitutes but is so vague as to avoid any obvious interpretation. Lastly, I suspect the helium-voiced Jon Anderson has a list of mystical bullshit items he drops into songs when lacking inspiration. I imagine that, every time he’s at a loss for a line, he just drops in something like “watch the eagle fly”.
The album is even a bit dodgy on the musical side. I keep thinking I hate power ballads and bubblemetal but, frankly, this album has a fair amount of material that has whiffs of each. If there’s one recurring element I wasn’t crazy about, it is the tom rolls on the drums. You know, that kind of thing like Phil Collins did in “Something In The Air Tonight”. But the single worst element moment on the record musically is the opening of closing track “Hearts”, which has a tinkly synth that appears to be emulating Shroeder’s toy piano from Peanuts. It conveys a feeling I can only describe as “ice cream castles in the air”, and that’s not a compliment.
Fortunately, the song redeems itself in a stellar chorus, which has swooping basslines that are probably the closest bridge from this material to the preceding era with those Roger Dean album covers. More than one song is also redeemed by its chorus, as “Changes” and the aforementioned “City of Love”. I never really thought about it before, but where the music of this band has most resonated with me is in its choruses. Yes is like a plane that seems iffy on takeoff, and usually hits some turbulence while in the air, but which usually sticks the landing.
But there are four songs here which are just front-to-back great and, wisely, three of those were chosen as the album’s singles, those being “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”, “Leave It” and “It Can Happen”. The fourth is “Hold On”, which was actually issued as a promo-only 12” inch. I think that song had a better chance of success than “It Can Happen”, but I guess we’ll never know if it would. In my opening paragraph, I mentioned how much I love the cover art, and the commercially issued singles carried over its visual motifs, which is an approach I always appreciate. When a visual design is carried across an album and its related releases, I imagine something akin to a planet and its satellites. The design work done for Pixies was very much of this mindset.
“Owner” was the obvious first single. It was such a radical departure from anything the group had released before that it polarized fans as completely as the later “Learning To Fly” did for Pink Floyd. Admittedly, the synth stabs in this track lock it in 1983 for all time, but something still feels shockingly modern about the overall track to me, with it always feeling fresh and new, no matter how many times I hear it. I suspect that is only because it was so startlingly new when I heard it on its original release. I wonder how I would regard the song today if I hadn’t heard it first way back then.
But the song that I love most on the album, and which originally pulled me into its orbit, is “Leave It”. I find it very difficult to convey in words what it sounds like, with its intricate and interwoven vocal lines. My first thought was “computerized barbershop quartet”, but the nonsense vocal sounds in the background are closer to doo wop or scat singing. In a bold move for a pop single in 1983, its opening verse is a capella). Even after that, the structure of the rest is unconventional. It is not only unprecedented for Yes, but I don’t recall ever hearing anything else really like it before or since. Of course, the lyrics are complete garbage, but I simply overlook that for this album. A final odd aspect of the song are the multiple versions of the music video made and aired on MTV at the time. According to Wikipedia, there were eighteen versions made of the goofy clip where suit-clad members of the group are subjected to various, primitive computer distortions. It was ground-breaking for its time and laughably dated today.
I didn’t think there was anything more I could glean from the album in the intervening four decades, but then I was pleasantly surprised by a double LP, 45 RPM version released by Analogue Productions this year. My turntable setup is far from any kind of audiophile standards, yet I can still say definitively that this is the single best pressing I have ever heard of any album. The clarity of the instruments and the depth of the sound is startling. I swear I can even hear the space between the instruments. Overall, the experience of hearing the music when expertly mastered in an all-analog chain transcends the quality of the music itself. This may be the closest I can come to understanding why some people watch completely garbage movies on the highest resolution television.
From the music and that album cover, it is obvious this was not the same Yes that released The Yes Album over a decade before. Similar to how that album was a major step beyond their first, and self-titled album, 90125 is leaps and bounds beyond either and even that title suggests this. Really, isn’t there something vaguely unnerving about that title when in combination with that cover? This title reveals nothing and is actually the catalog number for the original release. So, in a weird way, this is their third self-titled release, but with a label that is even more curious than if that had named it Untitled or Eponymous. The music may be not entirely worthy of the concept, but I have to give credit to album artwork that still holds such mystery for me.