Talk about Yes; talk about Talk

Lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking about Yes, about what makes their best music both distinctive and worth a bit of your consideration. To those of you wondering why I'm posting about a band that, for most people, ceased to matter much after "Owner of a Lonely Heart," allow me to supply some context.
One of the very first albums I bought was The Yes Album. Well, okay: my dad bought it for me; for reasons now lost to me, we went record-shopping one Saturday and I found it in the bargain bin ($2) and he said okay. My father, pretty much open to all kinds of music, said, midway through "Yours Is No Disgrace," "When is it going to do its thing?" What do parents know, right? I was entranced. And I still am, especially by their older music (more about that later). Fast forward to November of last year, when I went to visit my children for Thanksgiving; one of the CDs I took along was House of Yes: Live from House of Blues, and I intended, really I did, to post something about Yes soon after. The road to hell . . . Anyway. In the interim, I ran across the exceedingly difficult-to-find Talk, the last album from the Jon Anderson-Trevor Rabin-Chris Squire-Tony Kaye-Alan White configuration of the band, recently rereleased and with an alternate cut besides, and I snatched it up and, a couple of months later, I still pop it into the CD player with the goal of deciding whether or not I like it (whether it is "Yes music" is another matter entirely, and a tar pit I'll sorta stick my toe into but not jump into--those so inclined can find any number of fora more than happy to accommodate y'all). It's not their most recent album, but Talk (1994) is a pretty good case study, for this fan at least, about what Yes once was and is becoming, for better or for worse.
Somewhere in his particular corner of the official Yes website, Jon Anderson says that Trevor Rabin's liability to the band was that "he couldn't write Yes music." Well duh, Jon. He's a different sort of guitarist from Steve Howe; his orientation, if not his background, seems more pop-based than classical. But the very structure of Yes's songs--which, to be honest, began to change with Drama and thus can't be blamed on Rabin--is different on the Rabin albums. He tries to write one in the old style on "Endless Dream," but it seems ill-formed (and I read somewhere recently that Victory (the label that released Talk) asked him to write something "epic" and he was reluctant to do so--probably because he knows he's not that kind of writer. I think as well that Anderson has in mind the lyrics of Rabin's songs, but I'll leave that alone for the moment.
Traditional pop songs have sturdy verse-chorus structures with, perhaps, a bridge or an instrumental break in them, but still and all their outward shape tells us pretty much what we're gonna find "inside" them in terms of their structure. Now: consider the structure of Yes's best-known older song, "Roundabout":

The intro;
then the first verse, with a sustained note at its end;
then the second verse, the sustained note now leading to the first appearance of the chorus ("In and around the lake/Mountains come out of the sky . . .");
then a little teasing organ flourish from Rick Wakeman;
then the third verse and chorus;
then Wakeman's teasing flourish turns into the song's bridge ("Along the drifting cloud/the eagle searching down on the land . . .");
then a reprise of the intro;
then the chorus revisited as that roaring bash of an instrumental break;
then the final verse-chorus;
then the song's conclusion (those lovely harmonized "da-da-da-doo-da-da-da's," followed by yet another reprise--Howe's acoustic guitar lick that leads into the first verse of the song).

Can you see it? The song's structure grows from within, rather like a plant emerging from a seed but never quite leaving behind its starting point. Not every Yes song does that, but many of the older ones do. The song grows in its structural complexity as it progresses. Yes has always been about skilful playing (Alan White is a fine drummer, but I do miss Bill Bruford's "I can play everything and I do mean EVERYthing" drums, even after 30 years), but I think that what I really keep coming back for are those marvelously-intricate song structures.
Now: On Talk, the one song I cannot seem to hear enough is the opening track, "The Calling." Let me just say that Yes has never written before such an unabashedly-mainstream-rock-n-roll-y chorus, as regards its music. Some Yes purists might see that as condemnation; I'd say to them that the unabashedly-mainstream-rock-n-roll-y chorus, though often maligned, nevertheless has survived for a reason, and how this song deploys it is more than enough justification for its continued survival. It is reminiscent of "Roundabout"'s chorus, but with less restraint. The other songs, with the exception of "Endless Spring," are more or less okay; but if one song from this album deserves to make it into the live repertoire, it's this one.
But: good rock song though it is, it doesn't have the sort of intricate structure that I outlined above. I'll have to listen again to the more recent albums to confirm this, but the newer material is, I'd venture to say, absent it as well. Yes: Yes have been becoming a fairly pedestrian (for them) rock band, musically speaking. Chris Squire's bass, once almost as much a lead instrument as Howe's guitar, now sorta pleasantly plunks along rhythmically (except in "The Calling," where it bears a fair amount of the responsibility for the melody); Wakeman's keyboards' settings sound as though he hasn't fiddled with them since the mid-70's; even Howe's solos are a bit blah, something that you can't say about his best work with the band. Saddest of all, the lyrics are beginning to make sense. And though love of one's fellows and seeking spiritual transcendance are worthy things to espouse, the best Yes songs didn't preach; they created worlds which, as we contemplated them, revealed those messages. So: the more direct the message has become, the less intricate the music has become. Adding symphony orchestras (as occurs on 2001's Magnification) doesn't hide that fact.
So: Is music like "The Calling" the best we can hope for from this group? I don't know; what I do know, based on the reviews of Talk that I've read recently, is that that album was Rabin's show. And he's no longer with the band. The "classic" line-up IS back together, though, and though bands that have been together for almost 40 years have every right to evolve, it WOULD be nice to have their new music matter, even if in a different way, as much as the older music did and does.

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