OPEN YOUR EYES

Wakeman's departure threw the band into disarray. Tour plans were scuttled, and the remaining members went their own ways. Chris Squire began the songwriting process for a side project with longtime Yes producer and occasional studio contributor Billy Sherwood. This Squire/Sherwood material would eventually become the beginnings of the next Yes album, and Sherwood was brought on as a fulltime member of the band, handling additional guitars and some keyboards.

The result was 1997's Open Your Eyes, and this was truly Yes's nadir. Jon Anderson and Steve Howe claimed they were sidelined in the songwriting process, and it shows. The music here is mostly bland adult alternative-style rock. It's achingly generic and comes off as undercooked.

A few good ideas can be heard here. The opener, "New State of Mind" has some strong vocal harmonies, despite a notably un-Yes-like riff and awful synth tones. "Fortune Seller" sounds like a crappy, underdeveloped Yes song, as opposed to some other generic, crappy, underdeveloped song. Some workshopping could have saved this. And "The Solution" (or at least its first five minutes, at least; more on that shortly) is a passable hard rock song.

Most of this album though? Ugh. It just depresses me. The songwriting is so weak, so bland, so offensively inoffensive. I struggle to write about it, it's so interminably dull. What is there even to say about such snoozefests as "Wonderlove" or "No Way We Can Lose"? This album plods along, with every song nearly the same tempo, and the few speed variations all seem to be ballads. "The Solution" has a hidden track of 15 minutes of ambient nature sounds, chimes, and the occasional vocal snippet, which does absolutely nothing.

Open Your Eyes tries to be a Yes album at points, but it falls flat on nearly every attempt. The organ solo in "Fortune Seller" is one of few successes, and there is the occasional strong vocal performance. But when the high points are almost all vocal, that does not bode well for a band which has been historically known for instrumental virtuosity. It boggles my mind that this is the same guitarist and bassist who recorded "Heart of the Sunrise" and "Gates of Delirium".

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/03/24/deep-dive-yes/