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Jon Anderson & the Band Geeks — True
(Frontiers Records no#, 2024, CD)

by Jon Davis, Published 2024-11-25

True Cover art

With True, we find Jon Anderson fronting a group called The Band Geeks, and it seems that the name is appropriate — they sound like the kind of geeky musicians who learned how to play classic Yes tunes note-for-note. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Classical musicians certainly learn to play their favored repertoire note-for-note, and we don’t fault them for it, so there’s no reason rock musicians should be treated differently. We are certainly in the mode of deliberately sounding like Yes here, so given that band’s lengthy history and stylistic changes, the question becomes, “Which Yes?” I am going to come down on Tormato. Many of the tracks have concise structures, and nearly every song here can be related to a Tormato track, minus the famously wimpy production. Chris Squire’s iconic bassline from “On the Silent Wings of Freedom” is echoed frequently, as is the gritty tone from “Future Times.” The keyboards favor later generations of synthesizers rather than the Hammond organ and Mellotron of earlier days. Another major factor on True is the kind of acoustic guitar strumming that goes back to “And You and I” and has cropped up over the years in Yes songs as well as in Anderson’s solo catalog. The Band Geeks are super tight and perfectly rehearsed, which leads to my main observation about this record compared to Yes of the 70s: on those original records, there’s a certain organic feeling, that superb musicians were pushing their boundaries, especially in Steve Howe’s guitar. True is much too polished to capture that rawness. Listeners who love the classic sound and want to hear new songs in that style will find a lot to love here.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Jon Anderson

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