When the concept and cover art are better than the material featured on the album, there is a fatal flaw at play. Yes has no right to feature such drama across their discography, especially considering they do not provide music creatively thrilling enough to warrant fallouts and frequent line-up changes. Union is as ironic a title as it gets for the group, who may as well have called this Friendship in Different Spaces. It would at least be a more honest offering from the band, who could not be coaxed into working together. They did, however, offer instrumentals and sparse bits of work to a money-hungry label that believed, of all the bands on their roster, Yes was the safest bet. Dark times, the early 1990s. At a time when grunge, alternative rock and shoegaze were dominating the world, a progressive rock album without the members who made Yes a success feels like a race to the bottom of the charts.
At least it cracked the top ten in the UK. Four former Yes members were joined by a fifth member, John Anderson, and only on his appearance did Cinema think to call themselves Yes. Two albums into this half-baked reunion and Anderson would leave to reunite with three other Yes members, who did not call themselves Yes. It’s a headache-inducing spiral which saw both groups unite for Union. They made a mess of this with the in-fighting from years before, and even that begins spilling into what could have been a fascinating overlap of eight players who were, at one point or another, each the beating heart of the Close to the Sky hitmakers. What follows though, is a seventy-minute adaptation to pop-rock. I Would Have Waited Forever is a genuine surprise. Yes had given up years before but this drum machine, loop-reliant horror show is impressive as it charts new lows for the band. Synth-heavy dreck which suffers from the ever-present infighting of original band members.
What this means for Union is a fractured sound in the studio with over forty people pulling the project in this or that direction. It’s a mess, to say the least. But this sanitised car crash of an album has very little going for it to hold a listener’s attention. A dated, messy piece of work is what comes through. Shock to the System? Yes, it is. Horrific, pop-adjacent rock which, between the muffled vocal work and overwhelmingly hollow instrumental style, is an example of Yes at their very worst. Union is such a letdown. But it’s more because there are moments of real interest within. Lift Me Up is fine enough, a touch of class in an otherwise emotionless album. Even then, it is miles behind the quality expected of Yes. Horribly dated, but then that is the Yes tone hard at work. Every song sounds as though it is filled with a British whimsy which died out long before the band formed.
Those offerings are at their worst when Yes continues using the dated genre tones of the 1980s. It was the start of a new decade, and they seemed slow on the uptake of modern tones. Saving My Heart is a disgraceful piece, a song which sounds worthy of being a B-side from the mid-80s at best. One of the many songs heard on Union which should not have made it out of the studio. Tonally, the album is all over the place. Spots of near religious fervour paired with the lute-playing filth you would hear in freezing theatre halls when adapting Robin Hood. Take a listen to the misery on Miracle of Life. It’s a band in the death throes of their time together, insisting all is well. At least the captain returns to sink with his prog-rock ship, as does his second-rate team of first mates, fighting one another as the depths take them.
