UNION

Another controversial YES album that don't get too much love these days! You would think at first that 8 members of YES together would produce something great! But the problem this is not an UNION, not even a reunion as two different bands are recording separately pieces of music put assembled together on one CD under the YES banner.

WE have here the members of ABWH meeting the then-current YES line up, the only common point is JON ANDERSON singing for everybody. CHRIS SQUIRE is not even playing bass for the ANDERSON-BRUFORD-WAKEMAN-HOWE songs. This honor is left to TONY LEVIN. The relationship between HOWE and ANDERSON was not that great at the time either (always in trouble with his guitarists, the ''poor'' Anderson) , so another guitarist is brought to the fore to play some HOWE parts; that's a very complicated story.

I saw them live at this time in MIAMI and the 8 members were actually playing together and the show was awesome if i remember properly. They were on a turning round stage, like that everyone of them could be seen from the crowd as to not hurt any feelings or better, egos of some of the musicians . I recall the arena (15000 people) was sold out, so i guess YES was still a big draw back then.

A big surprise for all the old fans like me was the return of ROGER DEAN artwork on a YES sleeve; at least it kept us young!!what a beautiful cover once again!So what are we going to hear on this CD; a mixed bag of everything. Commercial RABIN songs are of course present with 4 songs (that's it), not great, not bad, even cheesy like ''saving my heart''.

The meat comes with the ABWH tunes -10 of them- and are also the more interesting. I do like a few like ''i would have waited forever'', the hard rocking ''schock to the system'' without HOWE, ''Angkor wat'', the beautiful SQUIRE-penned ''the more we live''. Yes , if you give yourself the time to get into this album, you may find some unexpected treasures like also MASQUERADE, a nice HOWE acoustic tune .

This is by no means a YES masterpiece, but the diversity of the album makes it interesting and fresh and yes, there are prog moments. ''Angkor wat'' or ''i should have waited forever'' is as good YES as it gets.

So 3 stars for UNION!

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