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"Heaven & Earth" is the twenty-first studio album from the English progressive rock band Yes, first released on 16 July 2014 on Frontiers Records. It is their first album with singer Jon Davison in the band's line-up, and the final studio album to feature original bassist and founder Chris Squire before his death in 2015.
It was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who first worked with the band on recording sessions in 1979, and mixed by then-former and now-current member Billy Sherwood. Upon its release, Heaven & Earth peaked at number 20 in the UK, the band's highest chart performance since their 1994 album Talk. It also entered the U.S. chart at number 26.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 53, based on 7 reviews, indicating "Mixed or average reviews ".
User Album Review
Listening to Heaven & Earth makes one wonder about what happened to the spirited playing and vigor of rediscovery displayed on Fly from Here. This is as far from prog rock as Yes has traveled; it's even further afield than the pop experiments on Talk or The Ladder. With Baker at the helm, what transpires is a slick, edgeless, badly executed attempt at adult-oriented pop, and for that, you need real hooks, and none exist here. Alan White's drums are almost exclusively used merely as rhythm tracks; their mix is ribbon thin. Chris Squire's fat, distorted, roiling bass, which has been a guiding signature of the band's sound since inception, is reined in so much it is nearly generic. Steve Howe's use of volume pedals and cross-channel shifting -- even in his fills -- shows little of his inventive playing acumen. Geoff Downes' keyboards are so soft, decorative, and "pretty," they displace whatever energy the arrangements might have called for. There are a few places where Yes does come across as something resembling its former self: the musical architecture in the (first) bridge in "Step Beyond," the brief crescendo-building in the middle section of "Light of the Ages," and in the longest and final track, "Subway Walls." On the latter, after a sleepy two-minute keyboard intro, Squire's bass reclaims some of its authority and drives White's syncopated beats as well as enjoyable head-to-head interplay between Howe and Downes engaging in knotty twists and turns, resulting in solid organ and guitar solos. But one track does not an album make. This set makes one yearn for (some of) the prog excesses of old; Heaven & Earth is the most creatively challenged and energetically listless record in Yes' catalog.
Reviewed by Thom Jurek for allmusic.com.
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