If this is progressive rock, how come Wakeman repeatedly falls back on his classical training, throwing in a baroque bit here and a synthesized trumpet flourish there? More nostalgic than innovative, Wakeman and Anderson pine for
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"a distant life/Covered in greens of a golden age," as they describe it in "Madrigal," a prissy little pastoral song set to the cloying strains of a harpsichord. Even an ostensibly prophetic number like "Future Times" peers back over its shoulder to a time when the mythical Dantalion will ride
again. No doubt Yes' cloudy cosmology contains a rationale for such circularity: "Roundabout" is the band's signature tune, after all, and on the new LP, Anderson pipes, "We go round and round and round and round/Until we pick it up again." But such a perspective is not particularly forward-looking. Indeed,
Tormato's jumble of fairy tales and flying saucers, so tritely typical of progressive rock in general, recalls the deliberately childlike vision of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which director Steven Spielberg has always wanted to end with "When You Wish upon a Star," the theme song from Walt Disney's television show.
Tormato salutes the Spielberg classic (as well as
Star Wars) with a bouncy track entitled "Arriving UFO." Progressive? Hardly. Call it regressive rock.
Still, the record has its charms. One of these, a pleasurable piece of cotton-candy reggae called "Circus of Heaven," is Yes' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Yet there's something missing even here, as Anderson's young son Damion points out at song's end. After Dad has dithered on about "Seven solemn flying silvered regal horses" and the like, he turns and asks the boy, "Was that something beautiful, amazing, wonderful, extraordinary beautiful?" "Oh! it was OK!!" answers Damion the realist. "But there were no clowns, no tigers, lions or bears, candy-floss, toffee apples...." No matter how meaty instrumentally, Yes' music has always sounded somewhat insubstantial because Anderson's rarified words offer nothing palpable to sink your teeth into.
"And precious little rock & roll," Damion might have added. One cut on Tormato, "Release, Release," proclaims that "Rock is the medium of our generation," but the tune's tempo changes are too jittery to deliver the title's promised catharsis. What's more, there's a passage here during which an overdubbed audience whistles and cheers as drummer Alan White and then guitarist Steve Howe solo with such
