Todd Rundgren: Todd Rundgren's Utopia : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Todd Rundgren enters the kingdom of extended synthesized compositions with this exercise in tedious pyrotechnics. These marginally atonal, naggingly repetitive constructions contain a few fleeting passages of technical facility—particularly the title track, a live recorded showcase for the synthesizer virtuoso, M. Frog Labat—but nothing here, including the occasional flashy riff, engages the heart or mind. The spare, embarrassingly mawkish lyrics speak vaguely of some Erewhon east of Kubrickville where we can all fly our freak flags high. Apparently the chief attraction of this far-out world is its unrelentingly pounding, one-dimensional music. This would seem to be the ultimate sterile extension of Rundgren's much touted studio wizardry. Rather than producing something self-conscious yet compelling, Rundgren has created a sense-dulling album that totally negates his once promising charms and subtleties.