Like most of the material on its predecessors, the third album by this team of Los Angeles supersessionmen is all pomp and no circumstance. Toto's 1978 hit, "Hold the Line," at least had an engaging chorus and pounding piano triplets to recommend it. Now the bloat is everywhere. Seemingly shoveled into the eight overwrought tunes on Turn Back, the band's homogenized, AOR blend of heavy-metal thunder, art-rock grandeur and pop-music bromide merely sounds like a load of post-Boston blather.

Where a simple hook might have sufficed in "Goodbye Elenore" or the title track, Toto insists upon working up an Olympian sweat, piling on cutely clever keyboard gestures, grandiose guitar heroics and those god-awful nasally three-part harmonies. These guys don't score too many points for originality, with Steve Lukather borrowing a Tom Scholz-type guitar crescendo in "Live for Today" and David Paich and Steve Porcaro getting a lot of mileage out of the Bruce Springsteen-style rippling piano figures in "A Million Miles Away." Vocalist Bobby Kimball is no inspiration either. For all the conviction he brings to the mixed metaphors and non sequiturs of "English Eyes" and "Gift with a Golden Gun," he could just as well be singing excerpts from the phone book.

Every bit as bland as its name, Toto neither excites nor offends. In rock & roll, that's definitely the dreariest sin. (RS 341)

DAVID FRICKE