OPEN YOUR EYES

Open your eyes and discover....so many better ways to spend your money Without a doubt Yes´weakest album, and surely the biggest dissappointment from a favourite band of mine. I remember being in a record store not even knowing that there was a new Yes lineup or album (I had no access to internet back then), seeing this album and inmediately buying it, going home and....well...the rest might not be said. The first two songs are actually good , and are what save this album from an even worse rating. The opener New state of mind has a strong Shock to the system feel and I really like it, same as the poppier Open your eyes. The intro to Universal garden is quite pleasant, but the rest of the album...forget it!! Yes here were clearly trying to recreate their 80´s success, with no success. Most of the songs are too bad to be even B-sides from Big Generator. No way we can lose is an attempt to re-write Saving my heart, in a very poor way...the chorus is particularly awful. One of the many problems with this album is that there are so many backing vocals that many times you don´t even know who is actually singing the song. From the balcony shows a very uninspired Howe trying to play something in the vein of John Lennon´s Imagine. Songs like Wonderlove, Loveshine and Somehow, someday are just too bad to be true. 1234567 all good people got to feel the love...come on!!!! The performences are mediocre for Yes standards, even though there are a couple of good Khoroshev solos, a nice bass line in Fortune seller and...not much more, really. Oh, the lyrics... some of them make I eat at chez nous sound like poetry. An album lacking in inspiration, geometry...and even the production is not so good. There must be more to this life and we all know.