You really surely really mean to diminish

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

23/10/77 : Going For The One - Yes

Who knows what this is going to give us?!?  It'll probably be a bit kitchen-sinky, won't it?

It's starts off surprising country - I wasn't expecting that!  But it soon settles down to be more typical Yes material though - Jon Anderson's fine voice over some complex guitar and keyboard work.  It's all very skilful and perfectly listenable, but I wouldn't say it massively clicked for me.  It was however, mercifully brief being only 38 minutes in total - I didn't need the 15:38 of "Awaken", but there's a decent argument it's really just two or three songs crammed together.  Overall, it's not great, but it's also not terrible - 1977 has been a pretty interesting year so far.

We're at a relatively high #6 in the charts this week on their fourteenth week of a 24 week run, with it having spent its third and fourth weeks at #1.  The top five this week are the not 100% cool best-ofs from Diana Ross, Cliff Richard and Slim Whitman (who didn't die until he reached the age of 90 in 2013, so I've no idea what was going on here), The Stranglers and Fleetwood Mac and the highest new entry was a Genesis live album (#8) and the next highest was Bowie (#17).

Wikipedia has a surprisingly large amount (226 milliPeppers) - my suspicion is that fans of prog are naturally predisposed towards updating Wikipedia entries.  This is their eighth album and it features the return of Rick Wakeman, who'd previously left after arguments about Tales From Topographic Oceans.  I was interested to read that the album cover is another Storm Thorgerson design, but the rest of the entry was far too detailed for me to be bothered reading - I recommend it if you're struggling to get off to sleep sometime.  The album was warmly received by the critics, with most of them welcoming the fact that they didn't try too hard to make things overly complex and it did well commercially, getting to the top ten in quite a few countries, including #8 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" Jon Anderson, Genesis, EL&P and King Crimson - nobody expected any of those names, eh?  I have this album marked down as "perfectly fine" - an interesting enough listen but nothing to draw me back.

16/10/77 - An enjoyable reappraisal
30/10/77 - I liked this more than I was expecting to

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