Yes: In a Word : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Five discs of the quintessential overstuffed prog-rock band by turns pompous and prosaic, pioneering British art-rockers Yes had an endearing innocence that makes even their most preposterous experiments understandable, if not always listenable. There's plenty to laugh at on In a Word, an overly generous five-disc retrospective of the band's thirty-year-plus career. But even in such overstuffed turkeys as "Don't Kill the Whale" and "Holy Lamb (Song for Harmonic Convergence)" the band was on a grand pursuit of transcendence that you have to respect. In a Word strains to build a case for Yes' later work, but the essential sides were cut in the Seventies (none better than the radiant neoclassical romps "Heart of the Sunrise" and "I've Seen All Good People") and could have been more economically contained on two discs.