There is an album that was too long, too expensive, too ambitious, and too strange — and Yes made it anyway.
Tales from Topographic Oceans landed in December 1973 like a monolith dropped from a passing spacecraft. Four sides of vinyl. Four tracks. One per side. Each one a movement drawn from a footnote in Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi that Jon Anderson had read on the tour bus between shows. Rick Wakeman later said he was so bored during the sessions he ordered a chicken and chips delivery to the studio. That story has been told so often it’s become mythology. What gets lost is that he still played brilliantly on almost every minute of it.
The album was recorded at Morgan Studios in London through the summer of 1973, engineered by Keith Harwood, who had a gift for making large, roiling arrangements feel like they had air in them. Producer Eddy Offord — the fifth Beatle of early-’70s Yes — had been there for Fragile and Close to the Edge, and he brought the same instinct here: let the space between instruments breathe. The result is a record that sounds enormous without ever feeling compressed.
The Band at the Edge of Itself
Steve Howe plays guitar on this record like a man who has decided to say everything he knows. There are acoustic passages on “The Remembering” that sound like they were recorded in a cathedral, and lead lines on “The Revealing Science of God” that bend time signatures until you forget what measure you’re in.
Chris Squire’s bass is the architecture. It always was in Yes, but here it carries even more load — when the rest of the band fragments into texture and atmosphere, Squire is the thing you hold onto. His tone through a Marshall is one of the definitive sounds of progressive rock.
Bill Bruford had already left for King Crimson by this point. Alan White was the drummer, joining the band barely three weeks before the Close to the Edge tour and never quite getting enough credit for stepping into that slot. He handles the rhythmic complexity here with a steadiness that the material demands — no small feat when bars are being added and dropped like weather.
Side Two, Alone
“The Remembering (High the Memory)” is the most underrated piece in the Yes catalog.
It opens with acoustic guitar and Jon Anderson’s voice stacked in harmonics that shouldn’t work and do, completely. The whole side is slower, more interior, more willing to sit in a single mood for minutes at a time. It is the side critics dismissed in 1973 and the side I keep coming back to forty-something years later.
Anderson’s lyrics have always been a kind of impressionist weather report — you don’t parse them, you feel their temperature. Here he’s operating closer to ritual than to narrative. Whether that strikes you as visionary or self-indulgent probably says something about where you are in life when you first encounter the record.
The album sold enormously and was reviewed with a contempt that still feels slightly personal. Critics wanted the band to make Close to the Edge again. The band wanted to make something else entirely. What they made was a record that requires patience, a decent system, and the willingness to not check your phone for forty-five minutes.
Put it on after the kid is asleep. Turn it up a little more than feels polite. “The Revealing Science of God” will open like a room you’ve never been in before.