With repeated listens, the melodies start to gel and the compositions start to sort themselves out in my head. If you don't get this music, it's on you." Some of the music actually sounded like Zappa but it was just as much an attitude of, "I'm a genius. The first few plays felt very much like I was back on Zappa's turf. Mike Canoe: Todd Rundgren's Utopia is a great example of what happens if I write my review after listening to an album five or six times, versus just two to three times. It's good technically speaking and I appreciate the bands musicianship, there's just nothing that makes me want to play it over again and again This album for me is a background noise kind of album. Unfortunately my excitement was rather squashed. 5/10Ĭameron Gillespie: I was really excited about this weeks pick, I had never looked past Todd Rundgren's early classics like Hello It's Me and I Saw The Light. So despite my natural prog leanings this one didn't work for me. Sadly this felt longer than its 60 minutes. Utopia Theme is a decent opener but Ikon is all over the place. This has more in common with Frank Zappa than Yes or Genesis though and the musical segments that make up the longest song (Ikon) seem disjointed and inconsistent. Instead we have a jazzy, keyboard centric display of prog rock overload. John Davidson: Todd Rundgren is the guitar player who made Bat out of Hell interesting. Overall, not a terrible album, but I wouldn't say Rundgren's brand of prog is my cup of tea. Some editing on the longer songs would definitely have helped both the sound quality and the enjoyability of the music for me. Side 1 is decent enough though, the guitar work on Utopia is good and Freedom Fighters is an enjoyable break from the overload, even if it isn't something that would ever show up on a best of Rundgren playlist (at least not one I'd compile). It also doesn't help that due to the length of the album, it had to be crammed onto one LP, which means this album sounds pretty lousy production-wise (an oddity considering how great of a producer Rundgren is). This is especially true with The Ikon, which starts off great, then goes within 6-7 minutes in (and then goes on for 20 more). There's plenty of great musicianship on display (Rundgren is definitely one of the most underrated guitarists out there), however a lot of the music seems to be good passages stitched together that never quite gel as a whole, and in the end don't really go anywhere. Excluding Utopia's Ra, which I've only heard once and don't have, this might be the Rundgren 70s album I listen to the least. I've read that Utopia's version is the reason Jeff Lynne wound up redoing it with ELO). Nothing really prepared me for this, not even hearing Utopia's Another Live (which has a really good version of The Move's Do Ya on it. After hearing that I started checking out most of his studio stuff from that time, stuff like Something/Anything, A Wizard, A True Star and others. Shane Reho: I started getting into Todd Rundgren five years ago after I bought a copy of Back To The Bars for the hell of it (great live LP by the way, I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a great place to start with his stuff). Goodbye, pop concision hello, elaborate compositions bearing complex multipartite structures.
#UTOPIA ALBUM VINYL SIDE 4 FULL#
If the image on the front cover of an all-seeing eye at the centre of a pattern of coloured balls suggested there might not be too many I Saw The Light-style three-minute pop singles on this latest venture, confirmation lay with the live photograph on the back: it showed Rundgren on stage at his most gaunt and strange, leaning back, lost in music, flanked by four musicians with outsized hairdos in full space-age regalia, and surrounded by a shiny arsenal of hi-tech equipment that looked as though it was capable of some serious instrumental bombast.įinal proof that Rundgren’s days as a purveyor of sweet pop candy and rock nuggets were behind him was provided by the tracklisting: there were just three numbers on side one, and one taking up the whole of side two. Four cute guys sporting Beatle cuts this was not. Todd Rundgren’s Utopia was this most mercurial of artists’ first recorded foray with a band since his (late-60s) stint with The Nazz, but it was a long way from Anglophile power-pop and winsome balladry.
0 kommentar(er)
