Talk or Open Your Eyes

[Mr. Holland]

Which do you favour the Talk album or the Open Your Eyes album? Vote in the poll, elaborate in a post.

[downbyariver]

This is an interesting one. I think Talk is probably slightly better, but Open Up Your Eyes was more important.

So, the context of Talk is that it is a reunion of the 90125 and Big Generator lineup, which actually had never been parted since their first album together in the sense of not being in Yes during a Yes album or a Yes tour, but had shared the stage with an expanded lineup both in the studio on Union and on it's tour, and was being restored back to it's original form.

As a big fan of 90125 and Big Generator, I suppose my hope for Talk might have been for it to be part three of that trilogy with the two 80s albums. Clearly, however, the band, and Trevor Rabin in particular, had moved on from that sound and had other ambitions, and so while the album was okay, it felt like less than it could have been (Again, while I liked it, I would have to say looking at it chronologically, it was also worse than Union, which for me made it the worst Yes album since Tormato.).

Open Your Eyes, on the other hand, came when the band was already at a low point before the studio sessions even began. The new material on Keys to Ascension, a reunion of one version of the classic 70s lineup, had not been very good (Much worse than Talk IMO- though not unlistenable). Now, the band would have a new lineup with first time Yes man Billy Sherwood (Who had been involved in the band in certain ways since 1990, but had never been a member), who had, as it would turn out later, been involved in a couple of very good bands prior to Yes, but who Yes fans probably didn't all know, joining the band, playing the bulk of the keyboards, and doing a lot more lead guitar and harmonies than people thought, as well as being a principle writer, joined by a different studio keyboardist on three tracks, who a long-time band member memorably would later refer to as "that Russian guy".

In my view, Open Your Eyes presented a new vision of Yes that both fit with what had come before and presented one intriguing demonstration of how that could look revamped into a modern context going forward. It wound up being sort of a one-off in style, but there were some good songs on there, and some people see it as the album that saved Yes. It also marks the beginning of Billy Sherwood's involvement in Yes, which I think over the course of his tenure has quite possibly saved the band as a continuing entity numerous times, and introduced the Yes world more fully to a very good very prolific bass player, vocalist, and mult-instrumentalist, a good portion of who's zillions of solo album, bands, and others side projects I seem to buy every year.

So, my vote goes to Talk based on an absolute judgement of the quality of the two albums in a vacuum, but I wouldn't sleep (or shut your eyes) on Open Your Eyes either. I think the hate it gets is a little out of whack. Love it or hate, we're not talking about a huge differential in quality from the other 90s albums, when you average them all out. It was definitely better than Keys to Ascension.

[RelayerI]

Talk is my favourite YesWest album by a very large margin.

OYE is a coaster.

[Soundwaveseeker]

Talk by a landslide. More balance - edgier, more cinematic, more epic. OYE production gives Talk a run for its money though. Nice crystal clear sound. Open Your Eyes really isn't as horrible as some make it out to be, but it is a rushed affair, while Talk sounds more like a thought-out album with contrast and balance between the Big Generator-like shorter tunes and the longer, more futuristic epic tracks like Endless Dream and Real Love. They worked on Talk for quite some time, while OYE was kinda slapped together in a way. And the sequencing: on Talk, stick Endless Dream as three and open the album with Where Will You Be and you've ruined the album. On OYE, stick the title track on first or swap track 6 with track 10 - no problem. It doesn't have the flow that Talk does.

OYE was important in that it brought Billy Sherwood forward from behind the scenes to center stage with the rest of the band, cementing him as a contributing new Yes member. There's some great stuff on Open Your Eyes (Universal Garden, title track, The Solution, Wonderlove and Fortune Seller), but Talk is the better album.

[soundchaser09]

OYE has about half of the songs which work well enough. Talk is superior as the whole album works well, with Endless Dream as a particular highlight, the drawback with Talk is perhaps the muted bass and the songs overstaying their welcome slightly (which OYE also suffers from).

Talk- 7.5/10
OYE- 6/10

[pianozach]

Talk 10/10
OYE 5/10

It's not that OYE is a "bad" album.

It's just that in comparison to other Yes albums its bar is higher.

[Old Frothingslosh]

Now your just being silly

[True]

Talk is very good record. OYE suffered from a combination of an absence of good material and poor production/engineering. Still can’t understand why they released OYE. No one bought it, so it didn’t seem to be helpful to the band to release it.

[Mr. Holland]

Now your just being silly

Well I am of course. I just thought this poll and Talk vs. Keystudio were a nice addition to the discussion whether Trevor Rabin should have stayed on after Talk 😉

[downbyariver]

Still can’t understand why they released OYE. No one bought it, so it didn’t seem to be helpful to the band to release it.

From a practical perspective, their new label wanted an album, some members of Yes still embraced the idea that you needed to have a new album out to tour in promotion of, and obviously neither the label or the band knew it wouldn't sell well until after they released it.

Looking at things at a higher level than practicalities, bands ideally in large measure exist to make new music. I'm glad the band didn't basically declare their active years as a creative entity over with and start endless nostalgia tours with no new albums in sight like the zombie bands that sometimes run around today not having created new music since we'll before the turn of the century. It's Yes, new music is what makes it authentic and not just a tribute band or a recreation with some special guests. As the years have gone by and lineups have changed, to me that impetus to create and release albums as Yes become more and more important, rather than less important, to maintaining the reality that the people we see on stage are part of same organically evolving entity that began over 50 years ago.

Earlier in your post, you said you really liked Talk. Others have sometimes said they really liked Keys to Ascension, The Ladder, or Magnification (and of course there are three albums and an EP beyond that, but that's probably a separate era of music that could be discussed in a different thread). All of those albums kind of existed in the same "We know they aren't likely to top the charts" era of Yes music after grunge was well-established. Different parts of that era of the catalog appeal to different people, and to different degrees. If people liked anything in those years, there is a sense in which the stuff they didn't like had to exist to allow what they did like to exist- the same thinking of maintaining a creatively active band and not just giving up and playing the hits at the state fair or something without any new music in sight is what made both the music they like and the music they didn't like happen.

No one is obligated to buy or listen to anything they don't like, and they are of course also entirely free to only listen to certain albums occasionally even if they do like them.

One thing is for sure, though- If they don't make new Yes songs and albums, you're not going to find any new Yes songs and/or albums you like.

I have a lot more respect for bands like Yes that keep trying to give us the best new music they can in the style of their band's past music, with whomever is in the band at any given time, then I do for bands that don't bother because the albums aren't big money makers and some people will go see them in concert even if they never release a new album ever again. I'm glad Yes doesn't take advantage of their fans like that.

I was getting pretty worried about the long gap after Heaven and Earth , but we got The Quest, and word is that may have the best album after that nearly completed!

I'd love to see something today like the 1991-2011 time period where Yss put out 6 studio albums (Counting Keys only once) in 11 years. That's probably nowhere near realistic given the ages of some of the guys and all of the things competing for their time, but it does provide some perspective and saya, "Hey, the band actually was really prolific and provided Yes fans with a lot of material in those '91-'01 years".

Actually, Yes only put out half that number of albums (3) from '80-'90, and even fewer (1) from '02-'12. '13-'23 is 2 (Or 2.5, if we include [I]From a Page as half an album) so far, with a possibility for a third.

I think the time period that OYE came out in is underrated.

[Mr. Holland]

^^Well despite some members still embracing the idea that you needed to have a new album out to tour in promotion, they somehow forgot to put the album into the setlist....😉

[madbear]

I like both of them equally, without them being in any sense great albums. But both good enough, say 6 or 7 out of 10.

[Ceasar’s Palace]

Voted OYE, but only because of the handful of songs on it, that I keep returning to. Talk is ok, but apart from the beginning of Silent Spring and maybe the solos towards the end of The Calling, there’s nothing there that thrills me.

[Gilly Goodness]

Voted OYE, but only because of the handful of songs on it, that I keep returning to. Talk is ok, but apart from the beginning of Silent Spring and maybe the solos towards the end of The Calling, there’s nothing there that thrills me.

This.

[Skankindead]

Talk, and it's not even a competition. Talk has been one of my favorites ever since I heard it - all of the songs are good, and a lot of them are great. The overall package is a lot more well-rounded as well - and of course, it has Endless Dream. Whereas I've always known Open Your Eyes as the most mediocre Yes album - not necessarily bad (in fact, there are also some great songs on it like the title track and New State Of Mind), but it really drags through most of the middle songs and a lot of them sound too similar. Also, it doesn't have Endless Dream. So, yeah.