UNION

If you thought Big Generator (or 90125 and maybe even Tormato) was bad, Union leaves behind an awful aftertaste. Chris Squire and Jon Anderson apparently came back to friendly terms at some time in 1990 and an idea occurred to assimilate Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe with the Rabin version of Yes, all under the name Yes of course. Both groups were working on material presumably for new albums.

The end result of all this was the album Union, released in 1991. Union basically contains the songs both groups were working on at the time. Anderson added his vocals to material Yes had done and Squire added bass and backing vocals to some of the ABWH material. Then a lot of session musicians were brought in to finish them up, I believe at the behest of producer Jonathan Elias. Elias apparently also had free reign over much of the material (particularly the ABWH stuff).

So we have eight members of Yes on this album. Eight members! Plus session work from bassist Tony Levin. You'd think this was a dream come true until you gave it a listen. It is the most uninspired collection of nonsense, filled with layers of digital synths and electronic drums. Nearly all of the ABWH material sounds unfinished. There is less material from Yes, but all of it too makes me want to skip each track. The only fairly decent song on here is Shock to the System, the rest is very poor. I guess quite a few people blame this on Elias as he had control over how many of these songs took shape, but if the members of Yes (whom many have criticized this album) would have stopped this from being released until they had something worth releasing, they are just as much to blame. An embarrassment to the Yes catalogue. Completionists only. One star.