Sound Chaser

This is where Yes leaned fully into jazz-fusion without losing their identity, and the result is something almost vertiginously fast. The opening riff is a knot of interlocking figures that the rhythm section unravels and reweaves at extraordinary speed, Bruford playing as if he learned everything he needed from Tony Williams and Max Roach and applied it to a prog context without apology. Moraz's keyboards are mercurial and slightly unhinged — chromatic runs, unexpected chord clusters, synthesizer textures that dart in and out of the texture before you can identify them. Howe's guitar is terse and angular here, closer to McLaughlin than to the acoustic romanticism he deployed elsewhere. Anderson's vocals feel almost swept up in the current, riding the music rather than anchoring it, his syllables fragmented and reassembled into something more percussive than lyrical. The whole piece has the quality of controlled instability — technically immaculate yet seemingly on the verge of flying apart. It occupies the same territory as the Mahavishnu Orchestra's most frantic passages but with a distinctly British flavoring. This is music for the moment when you want complexity that rewards close attention, not music for the background — something to sit with, follow the bass line, then follow the drums, then follow the keyboards, on separate listens.