Todd Rundgren: Healing : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Heavy-metal kids, be forewarned: no guitar histrionics or Utopian clamor here. This time out, Todd Rundgren has dropped the mantle of rock star for the quixotic role of truth seeker. It's a good thing, too, because Healing is a sublime, subliminally incandescent album – the music shimmers, the words pull seductively – and a strong artistic rebound from Utopia's plodding pseudoanthems and the infantilism of their backhanded Beatles "tribute," Deface the Music.

Fans of middle-period Rundgren will find much to admire about Healing: washes of synthesizer sound à la Todd; the thrilling, choirlike voicings perfected on Hermit of Mink Hollow; the Eastern intrigue pursued at length on Initiation; the pop-song economy of Something/Anything?. The artist's ingenious deployment of the synthesizer has grown so sharp that its impersonations of guitars, xylophones, horns and percussion could pass any blindfold test. Rundgren is especially deft at using the instrument for emotional coloration, evoking yearning, laughter and melancholy. Only Brian Wilson and Brian Eno share a similar talent for humanizing this technological beast.

Healing is a deep, swirling, mysterious LP that doesn't aspire to roaring peaks. In fact, the evenness of the music – like the unbroken surface of a lake, like alpha waves–works as an analogue to the redemptive calm put forth by the lyrics. "Golden Goose," a sprightly jig with a near-Hungarian folk melody, is almost jarring in such a context, though it might seem downright restrained elsewhere.

Thematically, the record is of a piece. Its eight shorter numbers (six on side one, two on a bonus single) are contained, haiku-style musings that dichotomize body and spirit: e.g., "Flesh," "Tiny Demons" and "Golden Goose" on the one hand; "Pulse," "Compassion" and "Shine" on the other. Side two consists of a single composition, "Healing," divided into three sections. It starts with a simple, compelling bass line (out of Rundgren's recessed Anglo-pop past?) and builds upon cushions of mesmerizing synthesizer playing as the singer beckons you into the spirit world with a whispered "Listen!"

"Healing" is apparently an extended meditation on transcendence whose parts parallel the stages of transcendental meditation. Rundgren, ever the able spiritual guide, even offers himself as a mantra at the outset: "If you need something to concentrate on/Concentrate on me." "Healing Part II" lifts you to a blissful plateau–the music is stately, imagistic, liquid. Then, with the crash of a cymbal, "Healing Part III" returns you to earth and reprises earlier themes.

It's a tricky idea–rock music as beatitude and vice versa–but Todd Rundgren pulls it off with grace and élan. And in doing so, he brings into clearer focus the seemingly schizophrenic personalities he's cultivated over a long musical career: the pop craftsman nonpareil, the kid down the block who's going to blow up the world with his chemistry set/synthesizer, the Zen lunatic looking for the key to the universe in a moment's silence.

Perhaps the largest achievement of this album, though, is that it manages to be both psychologically calming and intellectually invigorating. Healing is the latest bold step in a career as full of enigma–and yet ultimately as logical–as a Möbius strip.