YESSONGS

Yessongs is the first Yes official live album, songs from "The Yes Album", "Fragile", and "Close to the Edge" filled Yes' touring setlists, and many examples are put onto two discs for you, so you can see how these masters of the craft do live! What's new with Yes is Bill Bruford has left the band and Alan White has joined the fold, and is doing a great job filling Bill's shoes.

After Stravinsky's intro of Firebird Suite, Yes storms the stage with the Close to the Edge classic "SIBERIAN KHATRU". A few things are changed here, Jon approaches some of the verses differently, and Alan does some of the drum parts differently, not to mention Howe changing some of the guitar breaks and Wakeman being more active in his keyboard role in the song. I have to say that some of the melodies and snippets from the original sound much cooler in this instance than the studio version of this song, making this the definitive version of the song, and Siberian Khatru could very well be the song that best represents the sides of Yes. In fact, there a lot of the moments in the songs played in this album (which proves to be a live collection of arguably Yes' greatest songs to date) where you can find moments that can potentially top what was done with the studio version of the respective song. The surpriser here is "PERPETUAL CHANGE", because it wasn't and isn't today a big setlist gracer, but here it is in all it's glory. For a Yes fan, this is a dream, and for anyone else, this can be a good starter, even though tit's a live album.

And in so, it is only a live album so I won't label it as any kind of masterpiece, but it's amazing that the guys can pull off what they do live, and still make each song a fresh listen in comparison to the studio tracks. You can't get much better than this for a live album, it's an excellent addition to your collection because of how impressive it is, and the fact that a lot of these versions of the songs are in some ways better than the studio recordings.