IN A WORD

It requires a very long career, such as the one of YES, to need no less than five full lenght CD's for an anthology. But for anyone to enjoy it ALL is very unlikely, when the band in question is as ambitious as YES. I deeply DISliked the most of the music on the fifth CD, not enjoying ANY individual track from start to end (only parts here and there). I have been a YES listener for over two decades now but I still can't get into their 90's/00's stuff. It seems like they are trying too hard to make as challenging music as in the seventies while trying at the same time to be modern. The combination often leads to horrible pretentiousness. Sadly they fail to make beautiful songs also in the opposite direction, simplicity, if one judges it by the light of this box. Take 'Last Train': a 2½ minute doodling that repeats the same stupid lines over and over. Good grief. If I remember right, that song was one of five or so previously unreleased tracks (dating back as far as the late seventies). None of them impressed me.

I'm moving backwards here. I remember the original hearing of AWBH album in the late 80's was sort of refreshing, but the two selected tracks totally failed now for me. Big Generator ('87) was never my favourites but still I'm convinced it has better tracks than 'Rhythm of Love' or 'Love Will Find a Way'. Also the 90125 tracks are badly chosen if you ask me. No complaints about Drama; applause for not trying to make it seem less important album than others (as being the only one without Jon Anderson). But the worst track selection is from Tormato ('78), which as an album really isn't as bad as many want to remember it. It's just that the good tracks aren't chosen here; 'Release, Release' and 'Arriving UFO' are total crap.

My low-moral intention of borrowing this box was to burn a compilation CD set (naturally excluding tracks from the albums already in my shelf: Close To The Edge, Topographic Oceans and Drama, plus some songs featured in Keys To Ascension live CD). Well, I nearly took it for granted that I'd make it at least a 2-CD. With more consideration I brought it down to a single CD, stretching no further in discography than to Going For The One ('77). But boy, that result is wonderful indeed. A happy surprise was getting nice tracks from the first two albums too (one from each), while my memories of them were pretty low. 'Survival' and 'Then' remind me a bit of early CARAVAN!

Of the five CD's I consider only Nos. 1 and 2 well done (otherwise good disc 3 is marred by the wrong Tormato pickings). Fourth one is full of misses (or actually hits, but in this case it's almost the same thing). I haven't listened to albums Open Your Eyes, Talk and Magnification, so I can't judge the horrible last disc objectively. The lavishly illustrated book includes the band history and an essay on YES music, and naturally the discography with everything except the track listings.