Keys To Ascension is mostly a live album, which features the band’s final 1970s lineup (Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman, Chris Squire, and Alan White) performing in a small theater setting. The set list is mostly big hits — “Siberian Khatru,” “Roundabout,” “Starship Trooper” — plus “The Revealing Science Of God (Dance Of The Dawn)” from Tales From Topographic Oceans, “Awaken” from Going For The One, their epic reimagining of Simon & Garfunkel’s “America,” and one surprise: a version of “Onward” from 1978’s Tormato, with a newly composed intro by Steve Howe. All this stuff is fine; the band sounds good, the performances are energetic. (A lot of the vocals were reportedly either retouched or wholly redone in the studio, FYI.)

The last two tracks, though, are all-new studio material, and thus the real reason this set is worth a listen. “Be The One” is the band in hard-rock mode, reminiscent of Going For The One; it may not have needed to be nearly 10 minutes long, but Howe and Wakeman both deliver high-energy performances, and it’s got a lot of vitality. The second studio track, “That, That Is,” is even more epic at over 19 minutes, divided into seven movements. It begins with gently picked acoustic guitar, before the drums and a mantra-like chanted vocal begin to slowly rise at around the three-minute mark. As it gets rocking, it also gets a little weird — do we really want to hear Jon Anderson singing about crack-smoking single mothers in the ghetto? But the song continues to grow and expand, careening solos and densely stacked vocal harmonies tumbling out like waves, and ultimately it’s as exciting as anything in their catalog since the late ’70s.

The second Keys To Ascension album (both volumes were ultimately combined into a box) is more evenly balanced between studio and live material than its predecessor. This time, we get a full disc of each; live versions of “I’ve Seen All Good People,” “Going For The One,” “Time And A Word,” “Close To The Edge,” “Turn Of The Century,” and “And You And I,” and five new studio songs, the first of which, “Mind Drive,” is almost 19 minutes long. The shorter ones are actually more enjoyable, though. “Foot Prints” opens with a cappella vocals, but the track itself is a strutting, almost funk-AOR prog mini-epic (nine minutes), with the radio-friendliness of their ’80s material but more snap and energy. “Bring Me To The Power” is a more deliberately paced song on which Howe’s guitars and Wakeman’s keyboard sounds almost recall Relayer’s quieter moments at times. “Children Of Light” is a ballad featuring a lot of ornate and quite lovely piano, while “Sign Language” is an instrumental showcase for Howe’s liquid, bluesy guitar.

As ’90s Yes goes, the studio tracks on both volumes of Keys To Ascension are pretty good. The live material is thoroughly inessential, though.