Customer Reviews

Greatest Hits Live

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
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Despite a really misleading title (only half of the CD's eight tracks are performed live), this is actually a pretty good single disc compilation of later day "Yes" material, from 1997 to 2001. A better title would have been "Yes: The Best of the Beyond Years," a reference to their most recent recording label. Anyhow, this is a good collection of tunes, with the live tracks culled from "House of Yes: Live from House of Blues" while the studio tracks are from "Open Your Eyes," "The Ladder" and "Magnification" (their last group studio album to date). The core band of Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, and Alan White is augmented by Billy Sherwood (guitar, vocals) and Igor Khoroshev (keyboards) for most of the songs in this collection.

This CD is hard to recommend to fans of Yes, as they probably already own the CDs from which this CD was compiled. However, if you only know the band from the 1970s and 1980s (the Atlantic years), this budget priced CD is a good, inexpensive way to sample some of the band's later material.

Yes is my all-time favorite band. I own almost everything they have recorded, and there is no such thing as a bad Yes song in my opinion. They are that good.

As a previous reviewer pointed out, this set spans 1997-2001, the band's years on the Beyond label. But, you get some interesting live versions here.

I like the versions of 'Yours Is No Disgrace' and 'Owner Of A Lonely Heart' featured here. They are interesting, and it's nice to have them here on this brief little collection.

I also would like to point out that 'Homeworld (The Ladder)' and 'Spirit of Survival' are the album versions that appear on 'Magnification' and on 'The Ladder.' That's a shame; I've been wanting a live version of the songs for quite some time.

The reason I am not giving this five stars is because of the fact that Delta put little effort into remastering the tracks. In translation, the sound quality could be a LOT better.

Overall, if you're a Yes collector like I am, than you'll probably need to own this set.

Recommended, but only for the true Yes collectors.

Yes fans will want this CD, if only for a great version of "Awaken" live (one only can imagine how they pulled off this multi-layered song live), and the price is certainly right. But the title is quite misleading, since half of the tracks on this CD aren't live at all, and seem to be added to this collection to fill out the CD and also to promote Yes's last studio CD, "The Ladder." Other groups have done this, to be sure, adding some audience sounds to give the appearance of being live, but this CD doesn't even attempt to do that. "Homeworld (The Ladder)", "Open Your Eyes", "Spirit of Survival" and "New Language" are the suspect songs here: nice to have them, but they are not live. A better suggestion for the definitive collection of live Yes would be YESSONGS LIVE. There's no studio songs purporting to be live on that one, and more greatest hits, too!

This is a bargain bin item I picked up, believing it was with songs never before recorded live officially. The later tracks such as "Homeworld" and "Spirit of Survival" are the studio versions I already have. Laserlight/Delta think people won't know the difference, as these are usually impulse items. Also, there's a picture of the 1970-71 lineup, when these versions were recorded from 1997-2001. These comps are made on a shoestring. Nothing from Roger Dean is in budget, so a poor man's version is used. The same stunt was done with Asia and other prog-rock legends. No one takes these cheap CDs seriosuly anyway. For completists and casual fans alike, I guess.