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Album Details

• Artist: Yes
• Album: Open Your Eyes
• Label: Beyond Records
• Year of Release: 1997
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: gwhill on 2012-12-06

One thing for which Yes has always been known is musical virtuosity. It could be argued another is releasing albums that divide critics and their own fans and create controversy in the process. Open Your Eyes seemed to continue that tradition. After splitting from Trevor Rabin and bringing Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman back into the fold, by the time Open Your Eyes was released, Wakeman was gone again. Billy Sherwood had been added to the mix as a second guitarist and extra vocalist. Igor Khoroshev handled the keyboards, although at that point he was not a full-fledged member of the group.

It seems likely that many fans were expecting a return to the epic music Yes produced in the 1970s. Instead, Open Your Eyes presented shorter songs with pop-styled hooks and layers of sound vocals. In some ways the sound could have been seen as closer to the music produced by the group during the Trevor Rabin years. Further exploration, though, reveals it to be more of a blending of the two eras. There was a lot of great music on Open Your Eyes. Quite a bit of the set seemed to be closer to Tormato and Drama than to anything from the Rabin era. Yes, it was a nod to the more pop oriented prog-based AOR sounds of groups like Kansas and Styx, but it was still Yes.

Sometimes Yes albums were held back, in the mind of Yes fans, by expectations or buyers’ remorse in terms of acceptance, or lack thereof of the choices the group made in terms lineup. One of the problems here was that the set was released on a newly launched, unknown label, meaning that those fans were the majority of the people who even knew about the disc. Open Your Eyes certainly suffered in that regard. The more modern, wall of sound atmosphere was something different, but Yes always seemed to strive towards “different.” The truth is, in retrospect, Open Your Eyes stands up well against most of the group’s catalog. It’s more poppy than some of their music, but still works.

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