“Close to the Edge” by Yes

Yes gave the entire first side of their fifth studio album, 1972's Close to the Edge, to its title track: nearly 19 minutes, laid out in four movements, with Eddy Offord producing for Atlantic.

It doesn't so much begin as surface. The opening movement, "The Solid Time of Change", fades up on running water, wind chimes and birdsong, built from nature recordings Jon Anderson had gathered, then swells until a menacing guitar barges in, a two-note line racing down and back up four octaves while the bass climbs through an exotic minor mode and the band fires off sudden harmonized syllables. One more swell and the storm clears into something more melodic and familiar. It's prog at its most ambitious and most unhinged, a band trying to fit a whole landscape onto one side of an LP.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.