Great collection for YES fans, old and new!

I have all these albums except Big Generator on LP (and I used to have that as well, but it isn't a very good album, so I gave it away), but I wanted to get them all on CD now. I had a copy of Fragile that I bought in the bargain bin at Walmart, but it was the only YES album I had on CD...so this was a great bargain. I go through phases where I like to listen to YES for awhile every now and then. Unlike a lot of YES "fans", two of my favorite YES albums are Tormato and Drama. Probably because those were the ones that'd came out when I was becoming a YES fan. Those two and Fragile were the first YES LPs I ever bought. Shortly after I got Close to the Edge...which is probably my most favorite. I also like Relayer a lot too. 90125 is a good album, but not as good as the earlier ones. The first 3 YES albums are good as well, and I haven't really listened to the first two (before Steve Howe) much...but I probably will be now I have them on CD and can listen in my car. (BTW, I always copy my CDs and take the copy in the car...never the original). How do you review a collection like this. It's generally for devout fans such as myself. The casual listener would probably rather have a greatest hits collection...but that's kinda hard for YES fans because most of the songs are so long that a greatest hits collection would encompass several CDs. But all that aside...if you are a YES fan, and don't have the albums on CD yet...you need this. They've preserved the original album art in miniature. All the albums that had gatefold covers have mini-gatefolds, and Going For The One even has the tri-fold cover. Unfortunately, lyrics are not included, except for a couple of albums (Relayer and Tales from Topographic Oceans) where they were printed into the gatefold as on the original LP versions. I do have one gripe...the CDs that are non-gatefolds (which emulate the original non-gatefold album jackets) allow the CD's to easily slip out, because they made the spine so thick that the CD fits very loosely inside. They should have gone one step further with all these, and given you inner-sleeves just like the LPs had. They could have reproduced the lyrics and inner-sleeve artwork as well. The collection comes with a fold out poster of Roger Dean artwork, but couldn't they have also given you a booklet with the lyrics and other original album "candy", if they weren't going to incorporate it into the CD packaging. There are a number of bonus tracks on each CD. In my opinion, some of it is superfluous. Some are just slight variations of album cuts, but there are a few that are drastically different versions, as well as some entirely new songs that weren't released before. One cool bonus track is a version of "Does It Really Happen?", which has different lyrics and a vocal featuring Jon Anderson, instead of Trevor Horn. It is on the Tormato disc, not on the Drama disc. This hints to me that some of the songs for Drama must have been written (or partially written) before Jon left the group and Trevor and Geoff Downes came in.Read full review