Todd Rundgren had mastered the art of writing the perfect pop song by the time he was 23—so he’s spent the next four decades trying out pretty much everything else. While his early-'70s chart success posited him as a stateside McCartney, his subsequent career more closely resembles that of an American Eno: a musician-cum-conceptualist who didn’t so much forsake rock stardom for the avant-garde as inhabit both worlds simultaneously. Rundgren is forever at the center of infinite extremes: proto-punk instigator and prog-rock architect, celebrity and cult hero, casino-circuit nostalgia act and remix-ready electronica enthusiast, autocratic auteur and promiscuous collaborator, bitter cynic and spiritual humanist, genius and jester. He’s the iconoclast revered by everyone from Daft Punk to Prince to Earl Sweatshirt; he’s also the guy arguably responsible for inventing Smash Mouth.
As he gets older, these internal contradictions have only become more pronounced—this spring sees the release of two albums that respectively play to his accessible and exploratory impulses. But while the song-oriented solo release Global and high-concept progasaurus Runddans couldn’t be more different in sound and scope, they leave similar impressions: while it’s reassuring that Todd Rundgren is still with us in 2015 indulging his every whim, the batshit-bonkers music often misses the mark on "inspired irreverence" and lands directly in outright embarrassment.
Global is Rundgren’s small-u utopia album, dressing up his meditations on the environment, feminism, civil rights and community in synth-slicked rock and post-rave sonics, recalling 1993’s techno manifesto No World Order—albeit, mercifully, without the attempts at rapping. (And much like his tour for that album, Rundgren’s current stage set is more superclub throwdown than a rock show, with the singer flanked by Dâm-Funk and choreographed dancers.) But it’s an album where the timely, ripped-from-Twitter lyrics—complete with references to Miley Cyrus and Malala Yousafzai—clash awkwardly with the dated sound.
For a record so topically consumed with the here-and-now, Global feels like it could’ve come out over a quarter century ago: with its gated-reverb drums, robo-filtered vocal hooks, and arena-rock chug, the opening "Evrybody" recalls the Reagan-era moment when '60s veterans started lacquering up old standards with '80s production gloss. "Blind", meanwhile, rails against bible-thumping, climate change-denying Republicans over boudoir-summoning soft-rock, complete with a Sanbornian saxgasm. Perhaps Global’s anachronistic sound is Rundgren’s way of emphasizing that the issues he’s addressing were just as pressing three decades ago and we’re still no further ahead. But even more tasteful production couldn’t redeem the goofiness of "Earth Mother", a salute to famous female activists torpedoed by rote songcraft and hackneyed lyrics. ("We got a little bit too much testosterone/ Need a little more progesterone.")
Rundgren was the rare rocker of his vintage to embrace electronics early on (he was eagerly heralding the death of rock'n'roll as far back as 1975), but Global finds him trumpeting the music’s transformative, communal virtues like a neophyte who’s just come back from his first Burning Man, resulting in tracks (see: "Global Nation") that resemble advertising jingles for Euro-trance compilations. Likewise, the acid-house throb of "Flesh and Blood" doesn’t simply flaunt the influence of EDM, it’s about EDM; as Rundgren marvels at "the bang-bang-banging of a drum machine" and "the thunderous groove," he comes off like a glowstick-twirling Marv Albert doing play-by-play from the middle of a rave. When Rundgren dials down the bluster, Global yields moments of understated beauty: the addiction-themed "Fate" boasts a dreamily ascendant chorus, and the soft-focus "Soothe" has enough genuine ache to cut through its '80s movie-montage sheen. But for an album preaching a message of unity, Global just doesn’t hold together very well.
If Global overwhelms its four-minute songs with conflicting aesthetics, Runddans encounters the opposite problem: it unfurls across an IMAX-sized canvas, but struggles to stretch out its concept to fill the space. The product of a mutual-admiration society forged with Norwegian space-disco dynamo Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh mastermind Emil Nikolaisen, Runddans is a 39-minute album broken up into 12 tracks, meant to be experienced as a single continuous piece. Cleary modelled after the side-long cosmic-fusion suites Rundgren fashioned on 1975’s Initiation or with his contemporaneous art-rock ensemble Utopia, the album is an exciting proposition on paper. While Rundgren regularly communes with classic-rock peers—he’s a long-time member of Ringo Starr’s All-Star Band and appeared on the ex-Beatle's recent solo album—Runddans marks a rare instance of working with younger spiritual kin less interested in his catalog of hits than his excursions into futurist psychedelia.
For its first half at least, Runddans lives up to its big-event billing. Its movements are arranged along a loose cycle-of-life narrative that conflates childbirth with spiritual awakening (sample title: "Liquid Joy From the Womb of Infinity"), with the scene set by an entrancing swirl of oscillating electronics, gong-crash eruptions, and wordless vocals. The moment of birth is marked by Rundgren’s first utterance of Runddans’ central lyric—"I have waited for this moment for what seems like nine lifetimes/ You will never be closer than you are now/ Put your arms around me"—like a parent casting his eyes upon his newborn for the first time; tears of joy spring forth in the form of a gushing guitar solo set atop a celestial disco groove.
But once it achieves lift-off 15 minutes in, Runddans must grapple with the same question all new parents face after the immediate thrill of birth wears off: What now? The trio’s answer is to instantly deconstruct what they’ve so carefully crafted, randomly fiddling with console levels and chopping up the beat to bring the piece crashing down. It’s not unlike the sudden tape-slice change-up Tortoise introduced 14 minutes into their own art-rock colossus, "Djed", violently disrupting the song at its hypnotic fever pitch. But rather than use the opportunity to open up Rundanns to new structural possibilities, the trio and their small orchestra of supporting players cycle through endless variations on the piece’s main melodic motif, dressing it up variously in space-age bachelor pad exotica, sci-fi Beach Boys harmonies and West African rhythms all while the throughline turns evermore hazy.
By the time Rundgren’s incessant vocal line slips out of sync with the Pompeii-scaled Pink Floyd lurch of "Wave of Heavy Red (Disko Nectar)", Rundanns starts to feel like the prog rock version of Too Many Cooks: one idea repeated and reformulated past the point of absurdity into the realm of insanity. And sadly, there are no great rewards for your endurance here: unsure of how to end the thing, the trio opt to build the penultimate house workout, "Ravende Gal (Full Circle)", around their phone conversations about how to end the thing. Maybe that outcome isn’t too surprising, given Rundgren’s long-standing fondness for breaking the fourth wall. But while Rundanns has all the makings of a late-career triumph, it’s less a new watermark for Rundgren’s sprawling discography than an analog to it: beautiful and baffling in equal measure, all over the map, and beholden to nothing but its own inexplicable logic.
