Yes albums after 90125 - how do they rate?

There was a recent thread on ProgressiveEars.com about the later Yes albums and I thought it would be interesting to summarise the views therein. I found 36 posts where I could derive someone's rank ordering of albums. I then used sequential STV to produce an overall result. And the final top 5 are...

1. Big Generator
2. Keys to Ascension 2
3. Magnification
4. Fly from Here
5. Keys to Ascension

Which I thought was rather interesting. The period after 90125 has so many varieties of Yes: there was YesWest vs. ABWH plus the hybrid Union. Then came the classic line-up of reunion of the late 1990s, with and then without Wakeman. Finally there's the post-Anderson era.

And each of those very different Yeses gets into the top 4: Big Generator for YesWest, Keys 2 for the classic reunion, Magnification for the classic line-up minus Wakeman and experimenting with an orchestra, and Fly from Here to represent the Yes after 2008. If you include Billy Sherwood's role on Keys 2, you've got most of the people who've been in later Yes included (no Davison yet, no Khoroshev). You've got more pop-oriented music, retro prog and attempts at something new.

What's made later Yes work hasn't been some simple line-up combination or particular direction. Later Yes has blossomed in unexpected ways.

Poll: Best new Yes song of the '00s

I asked you to vote on the best new Yes song of last decade and, after 150 votes, the results were very clear:

In the Presence of: 67 votes (45%)
Magnification: 22 votes (15%)
Give Love Each Day: 21 votes (14%)
Dreamtime: 15 votes (10%)
We Agree: 7 votes (5%)
Can You Imagine: 6 votes (4%)
Time is Time: 4 votes (3%)
Aliens are Only Us from the Future: 3 votes (2%)
Show Me: 3 votes (2%)
Spirit of Survival: 1 vote (1%)
Other answer (Homeworld, which was from the previous decade): 1 vote (1%)

So, with a band setting out to write a new album without Jon Anderson, it is perhaps reassuring that by far the most popular piece of the last decade originated from Alan White. On the other hand, in the next two places are "Magnification" and "Give Love Each Day", both of which seem to have been from Anderson originally. Only two Magnification tracks got no votes at all (Howe's "Soft as a Dove"; and the shot at airplay, "Don't Go").

As remarked previously, the tragedy of the noughties is that there was just the one new Yes album. However, a smattering of further '00s Yes songs did emerge. Not that these were very popular! "Show Me" (on the US version of The Ultimate Yes) and the 2008 live piece "Aliens are Only Us from the Future" (now destined for the Squackett project) got 3 votes apiece, and I suspect some of those for "Aliens…" were joke responses judging by the online reaction to the song.

While the '00s didn't bring much in the way of new Yes material, the archives were flung open by a series of released on Rhino: In a Word: Yes, The Word is Live and the expanded and remastered re-releases. I count about 23 Yes pieces that were not previously officially available that came out last decade, and several of these hadn't even been bootlegged before. So, that's our next poll: which was your favourite?