OPEN YOUR EYES

By the time Yes released this record I had completely lost my hopes with this band. And, in a way, it was a good thing. I only heard this album this week and I don´t hate it as much as most people do. Well, I can understand their radical stand upon it. Had I heard it at the time I would probably have joined the choir of complaints. After all, Open Your Eyes is the follow up of one of their best, if not the best, latter day record, the excellent Keys To Ascention. That CD was not only recorded with the classic line up, but also showed the band in an inspired moment as songwriters. As far as I know Open Your Eyes has a completely different story: not only Wakeman is absent (replaced, in part, by Billy Sherwood), but also this was to be not much of a ´true´ Yes work but more a follow up to the Squire-Sherwood project´s debut album, Conspiracy. In that light is easy to see why so many people hated the disc: gone is the symnphonic prog rock of Keys... in comes the short, pop-ish stuff of Conspiracy.

The songs in general are not really bad at all, I guess, but totally uncharacteristic.Definitly different (the CD´s title should be Open Your Mind!). Even if there are several hints of the "old' Yes (Wonderlove for instance), the general sound reminds me more of their 80´s works like Big Generator than anything they have done in the classic pahse of 10 years before. Besides, Steve Howe input here is quite limited (a real shame!!), while Sherwood takes much of the control. To top it all, there is not much keyboards either. The production is a bit too modern this kind of sound. Yet, there are quite a few good moments if you´re not a too demanding listener.

By the way, don´t be fooled by the length of the last number, The Solution (over 23 minutes). The song itself is just 5 minutes, the rest is silence and, at 8 minutes we have birds noises sometimes interrupted by a kind of collage of sounds from the previous songs. A big waste of time.

All in all this CD is definitly for collectors and (hardcore) fans (specially of the Trevor Rabin era). Open Your Eyes is easily forgetable and not recommended at all for newbies. A 2 star ratying is the most I can give it and, even then, just barely. Even in the 80´s they had done far better records than this one.