Review: Yes – Magnification (2001)

Magnification is Yes’s 19th studio album.

I have repeated ad nauseam in my reviews of Yes how the band has stumbled from one crisis to the next over the years. I must, unfortunately, note that this pattern continued into the new millennium. Released in 1999, The Ladder was created in an exceptionally harmonious atmosphere, partly thanks to producer Bruce Fairbairn’s firm hand. Yes and Fairbairn had already begun to float the idea of continuing their collaboration when tragedy struck. Fairbairn died unexpectedly whilst The Ladder was being finalised, aged just 49. The album was completed to a high standard, but the collaboration, which had begun so promisingly, came to an end there.

The tour following The Ladder also took place in a positive atmosphere. A live album was recorded during the tour, House Of Yes: Live From House Of Blues (2000), and a concert film was also released on DVD. The difficulties began in the summer of 2000 during the Masterworks tour. The tour, which focused particularly on Yes’s progressive rock epics, was well received by fans but ended on a sour note. The Russian keyboardist Igor Khoroshev, who had joined the band for Open Your Eyes, behaved – to put it mildly – inappropriately towards a female security guard behind the scenes towards the end of the tour. He was accused of repeated unwanted advances, such as sitting on her lap, attempting to hug and kiss her, and biting another security guard on the neck. Following the incident, he was arrested and charged with assault and sexual assault, which were less serious offences under criminal law. The case was later settled out of court.

Apparently, Khoroshev had been behaving arrogantly and verbally aggressively towards hotel staff throughout the tour anyway. It seems that a touch of rock star syndrome went to his head rather quickly. Or perhaps he’d always had a screw loose. Be that as it may, Khoroshev’s time with Yes came to an end following the Masterworks tour. This was before the #MeToo movement, so all credit to Yes for not simply sweeping the incident under the carpet and allowing Khoroshev to remain in the band. In itself, the incident was a loss for the band, as Khoroshev was a skilful and energetic musician who was capable of doing justice to even Yes’s most challenging material.

The incident was extremely embarrassing, particularly for the vocalist Jon Anderson, who, at least in public, exuded an almost cosmic sense of peace and love. Anderson had brought Khoroshev into the band and, along with his wife, was a close friend of his. Anderson was even in the process of recording a duo album with Khoroshev prior to the incident. The album project, which was apparently finished – or at least nearly finished – was shelved and has still not been released.

However, with the right attitude, challenges can be turned into opportunities. Anderson, Steve Howe (guitars), Chris Squire (bass guitar) and Alan White (drums) were now without a keyboardist. Billy Sherwood had also already jumped ship. The situation was exceptional, as keyboards had been a central part of Yes’s sound for almost their entire career, whether played by Tony Kaye, Rick Wakeman or Patrick Moraz.

The band began to consider whether a symphony orchestra could fulfil the same harmonic and textural role. The idea particularly appealed to Jon Anderson, who had long been interested in incorporating orchestral music into Yes’s sound. He had carried out successful experiments in this area on his solo album Change We Must (1994).

Yes had already used an orchestra on their second album, Time And A Word (1970), but on that record the orchestra was layered over pre-existing rock arrangements. This approach worked well in places, but at times the orchestra sounded as though it had been tacked on. On Magnification, the aim was to write the songs for the orchestra from the outset and to create as organic a fusion as possible between a rock band and a symphony orchestra.

Orchestrating for a symphony orchestra is, however, no trivial task, and the line-up of Yes at the time lacked the necessary expertise. Chris Squire initially tried to persuade a former Yes member, Trevor Rabin, to take on the task; Rabin had left the band after the Talk album (1994) and gone on to enjoy a successful career in Hollywood as a film composer. Rabin was apparently interested to some extent, but ultimately declined, citing scheduling conflicts.

In the end, it wasn’t Yes who found the arranger, but the arranger who found Yes.

Larry Groupé, an American composer, arranger and conductor born in 1957, happened to hear a rumour that Yes’s management were looking for an orchestrator for a new project. Groupé had been a Yes fan since his youth, and he has said that Igor Stravinsky’s ”The Rite of Spring” and Yes were the main reasons behind his choice of career. The opportunity to work with the band was a dream come true for him, and he actively promoted himself to Yes’s management.

Groupé wasn’t exactly among the very biggest names in Hollywood film scoring, but by the turn of the millennium he already had several notable film projects under his belt. The most recent of these was The Contender, directed by Rod Lurie and starring Gary Oldman, Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges and Christian Slater. Anderson took a liking to the film’s music, and it was decided to give Groupé a chance.

Groupé was invited to the studio to observe Yes’s songwriting sessions, after which he was given three rough tracks to orchestrate, as a sort of trial run. In about ten days, he drew up the arrangements and, using a computer and keyboards, produced realistic demos that simulated the final orchestral sound. The band were impressed by the result, and Groupé was entrusted with the orchestral arrangements for the entire album. Anderson, in particular, was enthusiastic about the end result and was prepared to give the orchestrations plenty of space. Howe took a more cautious approach and was concerned about whether there would be enough space left for his guitars. It seems they struggled to strike this balance throughout the entire process, and in the end the record was remixed once more to ensure Howe was satisfied.

Groupé was clearly passionate about the project and put in far more work than the role of a mere orchestrator would have required. Under his direction, the orchestra blends seamlessly into the compositions as he crafts contrapuntal parts, counter-melodies and his own harmonies for it. Groupé did not want to merely duplicate the instrumental parts played by the members of Yes, as is often done in such projects, but to bring something genuinely new to the music through orchestral means. He has even described himself as one of the album’s composers, and although for one reason or another he did not receive composition credits, it is clear that the orchestral introductions and codas heard on at least a few tracks are largely his handiwork.

Groupé’s orchestrations blended naturally into the music, partly because they were written at the same time as Yes were developing their own parts. The band even altered the direction of some of the compositions after hearing Groupé’s ideas. This made the project challenging, but the work was made easier by the fact that the album’s engineer and producer, Tim Weidner – who had worked extensively with Trevor Horn – managed to persuade the band to switch from analogue to the digital Pro Tools environment midway through the recording sessions. As a result, editing and making changes became considerably easier.

Read also: Review: Yes – Aurora (2026)

The album opens with the title track, which runs to just over seven minutes. Beginning with a jangling acoustic guitar, the track strikes a rather successful balance between playful whimsy and drama. As the opening track, however, ‘Magnification’ gives a somewhat misleading impression of the album, as at this stage the band and the symphony orchestra do not yet blend together as well as they could. In particular, White’s drums are mixed just a touch too loud, and at times they clash with the orchestral sound. Stylistically, too, the track isn’t particularly symphonic, but follows a fairly traditional song structure. This time, the verses are more interesting than the ‘magnificate magnification’ refrain, which comes across as a bit monotonous.

The next track, “Spirit Of Survival”, works better than the opening track in every respect. It is the heaviest and darkest track on the album. For a Yes track, it is even surprisingly sombre. The track is driven by Squire’s impressively rolling bass riff, which brings to mind the ‘Peter Gunn’ theme. The band plays with a dark and dramatic sound, Anderson sings passionately, supported by Squire’s backing vocals, and Steve Howe’s wild guitar work also features prominently. A few rhythmic orchestral breaks effectively punctuate the music, and the recording and mixing are now top-class too. “Spirit Of Survival” is the strongest Yes track since Drama. A truly magnificent track.

Personally, I always associate the rather sombre lyrics of ‘Spirit Of Survival’ with the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, as I was listening to Magnification a great deal around that time. Of course, the song doesn’t actually comment on those tragic events, as it had been written months earlier. Nevertheless, the way it examines the state of the world with a mixture of disappointment and bewilderment reflects my own feelings at the time very well. And I have to say that, looking at the world now, “Spirit Of Survival” feels even more relevant than ever.

Unfortunately, the third track manages to dampen the atmosphere that ‘Spirit Of Survival’ had built up. ‘Don’t Go’ is the clearest misstep on the whole album. Clearly crafted with radio airplay in mind, it’s a neatly arranged pop song in its own right, but for me at least, its repetitive rhythm and Anderson’s breathlessly chanted chorus are mostly just annoying. Groupé has crafted a rather successful orchestral arrangement, but at the same time it raises the question of whether this approach was the right one for such a straightforward pop track in the first place. “Don’t Go” isn’t a bad song, but it just doesn’t seem to belong on Magnification.

The nearly eight-minute-long ‘Give Love Each Day’ begins with a two-minute orchestral intro that is romantically meandering yet, at the same time, rather sombre in tone, until Squire’s bass and jangling percussion pave the way for Anderson’s vocals. Whilst Anderson wasn’t quite at her best on the previous track, here she sings the exquisitely nuanced, faintly melancholic melody in a truly beautiful way. The more rhythmically driving chorus, with the strings swelling spectacularly in the background, also works brilliantly. In the climactic finale, the brass section sounds like a fanfare, emphasising Anderson’s increasingly intense performance.

I’ve always liked Chris Squire’s singing voice. He’s such a talented vocalist that he could easily be the lead singer in almost any band. However, when you’ve got a golden voice like Jon Anderson’s in the mix, such opportunities are inevitably few and far between. On ‘Can You Imagine’, Squire’s voice is deservedly brought to the fore, whilst Anderson takes a back seat on backing vocals.

‘Can You Imagine?’ is a composition by Squirre, whose origins date back to the early 1980s, when he and Alan White attempted to launch a supergroup called XYZ with Jimmy Page. The project fizzled out, but a few of the songs written during that time later found their way onto Yes albums. One of them was “Mind Drive” on Keys To Ascension 2 and the other is this excellent three-minute miniature. Squire has a distinctive melodic sensibility that differs markedly from Anderson’s style and brings a welcome variety to the album. Colourfully orchestrated by Groupé, this track – which speaks of the power of self-belief – would also have fitted perfectly on Squire’s brilliant solo album Fish Out Of Water (1975), released decades earlier, which speaks to the consistency of his compositional style.

The sixth track on the album, ‘We Agree’, begins with a fine acoustic intro by Howe, which flows seamlessly into a wistful woodwind melody. The end result, however, feels a little uneven. As with the title track, the drums and the orchestra don’t quite seem to be pulling in the same direction, and at times it feels as though the composition might have worked better without the drums at all. Melodically, however, the track is strong, and Anderson sings with particularly delightful emphasis, especially in the chorus. Squire’s softer repetition of the chorus towards the end is a particularly successful touch.

Next up is the miniature track ‘Soft As A Dove’, just over two minutes long, which is built mainly around Anderson’s vocals, Howe’s acoustic guitar and the flute. The result is a somewhat chamber-music-like and rather pleasant interlude, but Anderson’s vocal melody sounds a little underdeveloped, and the whole track leaves a slight impression of being unfinished.

The longest track on the album, the nearly eleven-minute ‘Dreamtime’, ranks among the album’s finest alongside ‘Spirit Of Survival’. This mini-epic, which unfolds naturally whilst offering unexpected twists, skilfully varies the emphasis of its orchestration. At times we hear just the orchestra, at others the orchestra supporting Anderson’s vocals, and then the whole band joins in. This time, too, the drums work superbly alongside the symphony orchestra. Particularly in the verses, White’s cymbal-eschewing, almost tribal drumming works beautifully. The impressively driving ‘Dreamtime’ concludes with a dramatic orchestral coda lasting almost two minutes, which brings to mind Leonard Bernstein’s musical language. It is quite clearly largely the work of Groupé, even though he has not been given any compositional credit.

I am amazed at how little attention this masterful and exceptionally successful composition has received. It feels like a veritable hidden gem in Yes’s catalogue. It is a great pity that it was never performed live. I assume the band didn’t have enough time to rehearse it to concert standard, and on later tours without a symphony orchestra, it wouldn’t have worked in its original form.

The next track, “In The Presence Of”, on the other hand, was included on the tour promoting Magnification. At over ten minutes in length, “In The Presence Of” belongs to the same series of mini-EPs as “Dreamtime”, but it is a lighter, slower, airier-sounding composition with a simpler structure. Based on a melodic main theme composed by Alan White, this four-part track floats steadily forward, maintaining the same tempo for most of its duration. It focuses more on beautiful, emotional moments than on an energetic surge. However, Anderson’s vocals once again display moments of delightful intensity, and Howe’s cosmically trilling pedal steel guitar is nothing short of magical to listen to. The final section, “Turn Around and Remember”, is simply magnificent. In it, Squire’s soaring bass line, Anderson’s declarative vocals and Howe’s pedal steel blend seamlessly with the symphony orchestra, which underpins the whole with just the right touch of subtlety.

Yes have often had a habit of ending their albums with a low-key track that serves as a kind of epitome of the whole album. This is the case here too. Occasionally, these ‘closing tracks’ have been among the highlights of their albums (‘Holy Lamb’, ‘Nine Voices’), but the two-minute ‘Time Is Time’ feels more like an anticlimax. Howe’s acoustic guitar and solo violin sound lovely, but otherwise the track doesn’t really leave much of an impression.

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Following the release of Magnification, Yes embarked on an extraordinary tour accompanied by a full symphony orchestra. Groupé wrote successful orchestrations for the band’s old classics, but unfortunately only a few tracks from Magnification were played on the tour. During the first few gigs, however, the orchestra, conducted by Groupé himself, blended into the band just as naturally as it did on the album, and the DVD Symphonic Live (2002), released later from the tour, proves that this ambitious concept also worked on stage.

Unfortunately, the album’s release itself coincided with the most inopportune of times. Magnification was released in Europe on 10 September 2001, just one day before the 11 September terrorist attacks. In the United States, the release had to be postponed by several months as the entire music industry was thrown into temporary chaos. The situation was further exacerbated by the bankruptcy of the record label Beyond Music, which effectively brought the album’s marketing to a standstill. It is impossible to assess how much these events affected the album’s commercial success, but the end result was bleak in any case. Magnification peaked at just number 71 on the UK album chart and as low as number 186 in the US. This was a particularly disappointing result for an album whose production, involving a symphony orchestra, was undoubtedly one of Yes’s most expensive to date.

Critics, however, generally responded positively to Magnification, and over the years many Yes fans have also come to appreciate it more than they did before. In my opinion, it is the band’s best album since 90125. The excellent The Ladder, released just a couple of years earlier, was already a step in the right direction, but Magnification raises the bar even higher.

The greatest strength of this superbly recorded and mixed album is that the symphony orchestra is not used merely as a decorative element, but as an integral part of the compositions. Larry Groupé’s orchestrations are exceptionally successful across the board and, together with Yes, form one of the most compelling collaborations between a rock band and a symphony orchestra that I have ever heard. At the same time, the song material is also strong. In particular, ‘Spirit Of Survival’, ‘Dreamtime’, ‘In The Presence Of’ and ‘Can You Imagine?’ are, in my view, among the very finest of Yes’s later output. Only “Don’t Go” – which seems designed solely for radio play – the somewhat unfinished “Soft As A Dove” and the unremarkable “Time Is Time” bring the overall standard down.

Jon Anderson also deserves a special mention. On this album, he may well be at the very peak of his career as a singer. His delivery is consistently warm, powerful and expressive, and the lyrics largely succeed in avoiding the sentimentality of his weaker moments. Alongside the optimism, this time there is also room for uncertainty, sadness and contemplation, which lends the whole a multi-faceted quality.

Magnification ultimately proved to be Jon Anderson’s final Yes studio album before he left the band. In hindsight, the album marks the end of an era, and although it was not originally intended as such, Magnification is a fitting farewell album for Anderson. It is a remarkably successful late-period album, demonstrating that, more than three decades after the start of their career, Yes were still capable of reinventing themselves without compromising their own identity.

Best tracks: “Spirit Of Survival”, “Can You Imagine”, “Give Love Each Day”, “Dreamtime”, “We Agree”

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Author: JANNE YLIRUUSI

Read also: Review: Jon Anderson & The Band Geeks – True (2024)

Tracks

  1. ”Magnification” 7:15
  2. ”Spirit of Survival” 6:01
  3. ”Don’t Go” 4:26
  4. ”Give Love Each Day” 7:43
  5. ”Can You Imagine” 2:58
  6. ”We Agree” 6:30
  7. ”Soft As a Dove” 2:17
  8. ”Dreamtime” 10:45
  9. ”In the Presence Of” 10:24
    I. ”Deeper”
    II. ”Death of Ego”
    III. ”True Beginner”
    IV. ”Turn Around and Remember”
  10. ”Time Is Time” 2:08

Jon Anderson: vocals, MIDI guitar, backing vocals on the track “Can You Imagine” Steve Howe: acoustic and electric guitar, pedal steel guitar, backing vocals Chris Squire: bass, vocals on the track “Can You Imagine”, backing vocals Alan White: drums, percussion, piano, backing vocals

Other musicians:

San Diego Symphony Orchestra: orchestra

Producer: Yes, Tim Weidner
Label: Eagle / Beyond

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