Source: The Yes Chronicles
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Concert/8459/tormato.html
Review: Tormato
Author Unknown
"It was a sort of combination of ideas without really anybody driving the
project."
-- Jon Anderson, from the
Yesyears video (1991)
Tormato
Atlantic 1978
Rating: ***
Best song: "On the Silent Wings of Freedom"
Produced by Yes
Cover by Hipgnosis; logo by Roger Dean
Engineers: Geoff Young and Nigel Luby,
assisted by Peter Woolliscroft and Pete Schwier
Orchestrations by Andrew Pryce Jackman
Voice on "Circus of Heaven": Damion Anderson
Personnel:
Jon Anderson: vocals, guitars
Steve Howe: guitars, vocals
Chris Squire: bass, vocals
Rick Wakeman: keyboards
Alan White: percussion, vocals
Track listing (standout tracks in bold):
Future Times/Rejoice
Don't Kill the Whale
Madrigal
Release, Release
Arriving UFO
Circus of Heaven
Onward
On the Silent Wings of Freedom
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Well, Yes did it again. They went from making a classic recording to
putting out a muddled, confused mess. First it was Close to the Edge to
Tales from Topographic Oceans; this time it was Going for the One to
Tormato. After those three consecutive albums whose groundbreaking
brilliance defined Yes for the ages (The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to
the Edge), with each one being more of a masterpiece than the one before
it, the band never seemed to be able to sustain that level of greatness
again. From 1973 through the remainder of the decade, the music hits lots
of peaks and valleys, with the uncontested nadir being Tales.
And Tormato does share at least one character trait with Tales: an
astounding lack of focus. However, where Tales consisted of a paucity of
ideas being bled to death, Tormato featured too many ideas being crammed
into short song structures. With the album's longest song--"On the Silent
Wings of Freedom"--not even cracking the eight-minute mark, the band was
clearly editing itself into smaller packages, which would have been fine,
except that in several places on the album, the band forgot to reduce the
musical content along with the length, and as a result, songs that run for
five or six minutes still have 20 minutes' worth of musical ideas
shoehorned into them. In the eight songs that make up the album, there is
very little breathing room, as Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman in particular
seem to be in a contest for playing the most notes--and even worse, they do
this over each other's parts. And on top of that, a lot of Wakeman's
synthesizer sounds on this album are nerve-wrackingly shrill and squeaky. I
don't know how (or why) he achieved this effect, but I'm happy he didn't
repeat it on his few future albums with Yes.
Chris Squire takes a bit of a stylistic turn on Tormato as well, with the
addition of a "harmonized" sound (that's what the liner notes call it) that
gives his Rickenbacker bass a sort of underwater wah-wah tone. I know the
sound grates on some people's ears, but I like it as a one-time experiment.
It's used with great effect on the opening to "Silent Wings," a song that
clearly finds Yes imitating its own style but is an enjoyable, uptempo romp
nonetheless. The intro, in fact, with its dominance by the bass and drums,
is somewhat like a high-octane version of the bass feature from the intro
to "Heart of the Sunrise," and it foreshadowed the aggressive punch Squire
and Alan White would display on Drama.
But for now, there were unpleasant immediate circumstances facing the band
and its way of operating. Punk rock, which in so many ways is the
antithesis of Yes's brand of music, was in full swing by 1978. Although
fans still strongly supported expansive-minded groups like Yes, the
recording industry and music media were turning their backs on them. The
Sex Pistols were the darling of the moment, and with their success among
the public, coupled with their ability to sell lots of their product,
bandwagon music-journal voices like Rolling Stone--which was supportive of
progressive music when it was trendy--began to write off bands of Yes and
Genesis' style as lumbering dinosaurs that were no longer relevant.
Meanwhile, record labels were expecting their "progressive" artists to be
just as commercially successful as the "new wave" of bands that focused on
immediacy and conciseness in their music. That meant that bands like Yes
would be expected to trim their ideas down into catchy soundbites and get
themselves on the radio. Trevor Rabin's Yes of a few years later would be
well suited for that task, and even this version of Yes proved it could get
itself some airplay, but it was not the way the band ordinarily functioned
in the '70s. The music was all that mattered, and if a song happened to
make its way onto the radio, that was fine, but there was no concerted
effort to write songs with the specific purpose of getting them on the air.
That the band couldn't comfortably operate this way, with everything having
to be written with an eye toward airplay and commercial success, is evident on Tormato.
Exacerbating the album's problems was that Jon Anderson, usually such a
taskmaster in the studio that he had earned the nickname of "Napoleon" from
his bandmates years earlier, stepped back from that dominant role during
these writing/recording sessions to give the rest of the group a bit freer
expression. Though a well-intentioned gesture, it left the project without
a unifying vision. And without an outside producer to offer any help, the
end result was a mishmash of unintegrated, disjointed styles and unfocused
playing that, as already noted, saw competing instruments getting in each
others' way rather than complementing each other.
Even so, there are some good moments on Tormato, including the
aforementioned "Silent Wings." "Release, Release" is a powerhouse of a
rocker, culminating in a rare Yes drum solo that eventually becomes
accompanied by Howe on a rip-roaring arena-rock groove (complete with the
sound of a large, cheering audience) that recalls the straight-on rock
style he displayed on "All Good People" seven years previous. The vocal
arrangements on this song, too, are among the best heard during the
"classic" period of the band, with Howe and Squire, and, I think, White,
briefly taking the lead in unison--just as Howe and Squire did during the
middle section of "Close to the Edge"--before Anderson swoops back down
over the scene. The limitation of Howe's voice can plainly be heard, but at
least it blends well with Squire's (and White's?) in this case.
Probably as a result of trying to hold onto their traditional style of
playing, the players do a lot of looking backward on Tormato, both
lyrically and musically. It's therefore somewhat ironic that part one of
the opening song would be called "Future Times"! And therein, even the
lyrics seem to tread over some old ground, established on Relayer: The mood
is one of a celebrating, conquering army of crusaders, either inspired that
it will persevere in "the course of evil" ahead, or perhaps celebrating a
fresh victory--these being Anderson's ambiguous lyrics, it's hard to tell.
The music, though, introduces some new vocabulary to the Yes lexicon, as an
opening unison duet by Howe and Wakeman resembles a majestic clarion call.
Squire's harmonized bass follows, and the regal atmosphere is underscored
by a marching beat from White, rat-a-tatting away on a military snare drum.
A feeling of joy and festivity fills the air after Anderson joins the fray,
his lines again interweaving with unison supporting parts from Squire and
Howe. The mood continues to be one of confidence, or celebration, or
possibly both, and as soon as Wakeman's thin-sounding synthesizer, somewhat
resembling the tone of a military-band piccolo, sweeps us upward into
momentary silence, Anderson leads us immediately into part two, "Rejoice,"
where he sings, "Rejoice forward out this feeling, ten true summers long/We
go round and round and round and round until we pick it up again/Time
flies, on and on it goes, through the setting sun/Carry round and round and
round and round until it comes to carry you home."
These lines are notable in the history of Yes, both immediately and
retroactively. In the context of the song, this appears to be the joyous
resolution of whatever has transpired in "Future Times." As it relates to
Yes history, the "ten true summers" is a recognition of Yes's 10th
anniversary--again, a feeling of nostalgia. And many years later, the
persistent "round and round" lines that dominate both parts of the song
would be revisited both on "Hold On," from 90125, and "Man in the Moon,"
from Open Your Eyes. In apparent contrast to the hopeful message of the
rest of the song, these lines seem to suggest (to me, anyway) that the band
realizes it's beginning to become stuck in a vicious circle--one that sees
the band members wanting to be true to their art while the record companies
had different ideas in mind. (It works in the context of Open Your Eyes as
well, which was very much a compromise album made for all the wrong
reasons.) Perhaps that's not the intended meaning, but it seems to work in
the bittersweet context of Tormato, where we are left with an aural
document of a band that wants to move on, but on its own terms, and can't.
Instead, its vision is being compromised.
The words to "Release, Release" seem to be aware of the problem as well.
Consider this: "We've heard before, but we just don't seem to move/The
pressure's on, is there lack of concentration?" Now that sounds like a band
that's aware it's been asked to evolve in a way it didn't want to and that
it stubbornly resisted for as long as it could, for when it was ultimately
forced to move, the result, under pressure, became a terrible lack of
focus. And then, in the same song, we seem to hear a more defiant message:
"Lost and wondering maybe how it is/Seems to me it's as simple as this/No
matter where you go, you're going to find/You won't see me in front, but
you can't leave me behind." To me, this says, Okay, if you're forcing us to
change from what we want to do, you're not going to see us leading the way
on the music scene the way you're used to, but you're not going to kill us off, either.
The other notable moment on Tormato is Squire's beautiful love song
"Onward." The musical landscape is very simple, relaxed, and uncluttered,
with a sparse orchestral arrangement that does what the orchestra on Time
and a Word was mostly unable to do--augment the music rather than ruin it.
A silky French horn takes the solo, gliding over the band's gentle
backdrop, while Anderson and Squire sing together in a gorgeous harmony
before and after the horn solo. And in comparison to Anderson's obscure
lyrical concepts of cosmic love, here we have Squire writing simply and
straightforwardly in what amounts to an ode to a lover. There is beauty and
grace in this simplicity, a surprising change of pace for Yes: "Contained
in everything I do, there's a love, I feel for you/Proclaimed in everything
I write, you're the light, burning brightly/Onward through the night/Onward
through the night/Onward through the night of my life." The band revisited
this song for its 1996 California reunion shows and reworked the
arrangement into something equally as sublime as the original--it went down
very favorably with the fans. After hearing this song, you'll see it's
little wonder why many Yes fans have chosen to play it at their weddings.
Ah, but for now, back to the rest of the album, if we must. Bearable are
"Madrigal," for its harpsichord work and some beautiful singing, and
"Arriving UFO," despite the occasional aural clutter, the ridiculous
spaceship noises, and the goofy lyrics (well, what would you expect?) that
sort of pick up where Styx left off with "Come Sail Away" and go a little
bit too far. But then things get really bad: "Don't Kill the Whale" is one
of Anderson's very ill-advised forays into social awareness, with a
hopelessly dopey musical backdrop, led by the aforementioned Wakeman
keyboard squeals. (Maybe he was trying to imitate whalespeak?) And "Circus
of Heaven" is every bit as hokey as you'd expect it to be from the title
alone, except that it's even worse than that, with Anderson's syrupy
sentimentality and faux-childlike wonderment at the parade of mythical
animals and historical scenes and gods and monsters and what-not being made
all the worse by a band accompaniment that's supposed to sound something
like a mystical calliope but instead sounds more like "Being for the
Benefit of Mr. Kite" with about half the energy and none of the self-aware
humor. Oh, and Anderson's young son Damion wraps things up with another bit
of overly precious twee, as he laments over the festivities: "No clowns."
Gah! Yes critics are more than justified in their sniping when it comes to this turkey.
Otherwise notable is that Eddie Offord still hadn't returned to the
producer's desk (he wasn't missed so much on Going for the One but could
have been of at least some help in sorting out this mess) and the mix is
dreadfully thin and unbalanced. And as for the album cover this time out,
Roger Dean still hadn't returned. Hipgnosis, the maker of the odd Going for
the One cover, created this one too, featuring a blue-screened photo of a
man's torso, clothed in a suit, his hands holding a set of divining rods.
What relation this holds to the music, I haven't a clue. But now, to
understand this next part, you have to know that the original title of this
album was to be simply Tor, in recognition of a rock formation in England
called Yes Tor, where, according to the liner notes, "on a clear day, from
the top, you can see far away places with strange sounding names." (Hey,
c'mon, would I make something like that up?) Well, the cover photographer
reportedly thought something was missing from his landscape and decided to
pelt his photo with a tomato, and then take a picture of that. Combine that
with the original title of this album and you get--that's right--Tormato.
Why the band approved of this is a mystery to me, unless they thought of it
as being an ironic twist or a pre-emptive strike aimed at those who they
knew would criticize the album. Instead, it simply served as an unfortunate
commentary on the music contained therein and was much too symbolic of the
critical flogging bands like Yes were enduring by 1978, in the wake of the
punk revolution. In other words, the splattered tomato unwittingly did the
critics' work for them.
It wasn't by accident that the band members appear on the back cover
looking off in different directions through dark glasses. Tormato, after
all, suggested a band that lacked focus and didn't know which way to go
next, in light of increasing record-company pressures, a changing musical
climate, and critical backlash. Amidst this melee, Yes grew weary and found
itself on the verge of burning out. The magic of Going for the One could not be sustained.
The group would try to carry on, but it was inevitable that something would
have to change. And when it did, it shocked everybody.
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