Open Your Eyes (1997)
1. State of Mind
2. Open Your Eyes
3. Universal Garden
4. No Way We Can Lose
5. Fortune Seller
6. Man in the Moon
7. Wonderlove
8. From the Balcony
9. Love Shine
10.Somehow,Someday
11.The Solution
Don’t be fooled by the cover art on Open Your Eyes. It might suggest a return to classic, retro Yes territory, but this album is anything but that. Instead, it finds the band in yet another transitional phase—and not one of their more successful ones. Coming off the back of the Keys to Ascension project, which I’d argue worked surprisingly well, there was at least some hope. Those records reunited one of the classic lineups for a series of well-received live shows and some genuinely strong studio tracks. But naturally, stability wasn’t in the cards. Rick Wakeman, true to form, bailed yet again after those sessions.
Which brings us to the new recruit: Billy Sherwood. “Replacement” is a generous word here. Sherwood had been a supporting player on the Talk tour, and now he’s suddenly in the band full-time. He’s versatile, sure—he can handle keyboards and guitar—but therein lies the problem. For whatever reason, he ends up being the primary guitarist here, with Steve Howe bizarrely relegated to the sidelines. So this is a Yes album with no Wakeman and, practically speaking, very little Howe. If that doesn’t set off alarm bells for fans of their classic sound, it should.
Still, Yes being Yes, they forged ahead. Historically, sometimes that dogged refusal to slow down in the face of lineup changes worked in their favor. Not this time. Open Your Eyes sounds, at best, half-baked. Worse, it often feels like a hollow attempt to replicate the Trevor Rabin era without the benefit of, well, Trevor Rabin. The production is slick but uninspired, the songwriting feels aimless, and the whole thing reeks of a band trying way too hard to cobble together something out of too little material.
The instrumental shortcomings are bad enough, but the vocals don’t help matters. Jon Anderson is technically here—his voice is unmistakable—but you’d be forgiven for thinking he was being crowded out. There’s a surprising amount of lead vocal sharing with Chris Squire, and while Squire is a fine backing vocalist and occasional lead, the two of them trying to co-lead most of these songs just sounds...wrong. Even on the tracks where Anderson is front and center, the results are underwhelming. The material simply doesn’t give him much to work with.
It’s not all dire from the jump. The opening pair of songs, New State of Mind and Open Your Eyes, are actually decent. They take a few listens to appreciate, but there are some good ideas buried in there. It’s after that the album nosedives. Fortune Seller and Man in the Moon are the absolute nadir—clumsy, overproduced, and downright embarrassing. You have to wonder how these tracks made it out of the demo stage, let alone onto a commercial album.
The back end of the record has a couple of modest salvations. From the Balcony is the lone track that really feels like Yes, featuring just Anderson and Howe on acoustic guitar. Even then, at under three minutes, it somehow manages to feel long. The Solution is also relatively listenable, but by the time you get there, you’re so worn down by the preceding sludge that it barely registers. It feels less like a satisfying closer and more like the moment you breathe a sigh of relief that the album’s over.
It’s worth mentioning that there’s some debate over whether Open Your Eyes even started as a proper Yes project. Some reports suggest it began as a separate Chris Squire/Billy Sherwood collaboration that got folded into a band release midway through. Maybe the thinking was, “Hey, this worked with 90125, why not try again?” Except here, the magic simply isn’t there. Luckily for fans, this misfire was sandwiched between two far better albums—Keys to Ascension 2 before it and The Ladder after. In that context, Open Your Eyes ends up being the easily forgotten stumble between two much stronger outings.
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