Bruce Fairbairn gave Yes one instruction: make the best Yes album you can. It is the only advice anybody had given this band in twenty years that they could actually act on, and they did. Six full-time members — the only time that ever happened — four months of writing together in Vancouver, everyone credited on everything, and a nine-minute prog opener that ended up soundtracking a science-fiction computer game. Fairbairn did not live to see it finished. The album is dedicated to him.

The short version

The Ladder is Yes’s eighteenth studio album, released on 20 September 1999 on Eagle. It is the only Yes studio album made by six full-time members: Jon Anderson on vocals, Steve Howe on lead guitar, Chris Squire on bass, Billy Sherwood on rhythm guitar and vocals, Igor Khoroshev on keyboards, Alan White on drums. Bruce Fairbairn produced. Recorded at Armoury Studios in Vancouver between February and May 1999, with world instruments from Randy Raine-Reusch, dance loops from Rhys Fulber and brass from the Marguerita Horns. Roger Dean came back for the sleeve. It reached number 36 in Britain and 99 in America, and it is Khoroshev’s only album as a member and Sherwood’s last until 2021.

Six people in a room

Yes met Fairbairn in Vancouver in 1998 while touring Open Your Eyes, an album nobody much liked, including in retrospect the band. He agreed to produce the next one, and then did the thing that makes this record what it is: he made them spend four months writing a demo tape together. For the first time in years, the whole group worked on the music collectively. The songwriting credits are shared democratically across all six men, with Anderson taking sole responsibility for the words. Fairbairn’s brief was famously simple — make the best Yes album you can — and a lot of the credit for what followed is his. He died during the final recording and mixing sessions, and Yes dedicated the album to him.

The sound

A deliberate return to the classic Yes shape with a 1999 finish, and much less poppy than its predecessor. The six-man line-up is the engine: with Sherwood covering rhythm guitar full-time, Howe is freed to play lead the way he did in 1972, and he sounds looser and fresher here than on anything else from this decade. Khoroshev is the revelation — broad, tasteful, and reaching for textures Yes had not used before. Squire and White are as solid as ever, Anderson sings a great deal, and the harmonies are stacked high. The world instruments and the occasional dance loop keep it from being a heritage exercise. It takes a less solemn approach to progressive music than the seventies records did, and a couple of moments tip into cheese, but the egalitarianism paid off: this sounds like a band, not a project.

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The songs

Homeworld (The Ladder) opens with nine minutes of proper progressive rock, announcing the intent that Open Your Eyes never had, and it was licensed for Relic Entertainment’s 1999 strategy game Homeworld — which is how a generation of people first heard this band. It is the best thing here and arguably the best Yes song since the seventies. It Will Be a Good Day (The River) follows. Lightning Strikes was the single and is the odd one: a sunlit, almost Caribbean groove that went nowhere commercially and divides listeners entirely. Can I? and Face to Face keep it moving. If Only You Knew is Anderson’s ballad, carried by Khoroshev’s keyboards and Squire’s backing vocals. To Be Alive lifts the last third. New Language runs ten minutes and hands Howe, Sherwood and Khoroshev a solo each — it is the other essential track. Nine Voices closes almost entirely on acoustic guitar.

Reception and legacy

The reviews were warm and the consensus was that Yes had found their creative form again, which after Open Your Eyes was not a small thing to say. The chart positions did not follow — 36 and 99 — and the album has spent twenty-five years being overlooked by people who stopped paying attention in 1980. Those who did not stop tend to rate it as the best thing the band did in the nineties, and some rate Homeworld above anything since Going for the One. The 1999 and 2000 world tour followed. Sherwood left at the end of it; Khoroshev went too, which is how Yes arrived at Magnification with no keyboard player at all and hired an orchestra instead.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and the best late-period entry point after Magnification. Homeworld first, all nine minutes, and note how much of Yes’s actual vocabulary is in it. Then New Language, for the three-way solo section. Then It Will Be a Good Day. Then Lightning Strikes, with an open mind, because you will either love it or skip it forever. Close to the Edge is where you begin and Going for the One is the late-seventies one. But this is what happens when somebody finally tells six talented people to stop negotiating and go make the record they are actually capable of, and it is a shame the man who said it never heard how it turned out.

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