See, usually my "I found this via" entry is either "some list", "some person", "some website". This time though! Well, it was AllMusic's tribute to 1973, from which a few of these albums came. But I wouldn't have ever bothered if not for 30 Rock, who used the name of a Todd Rungdren album to make a 2%'er roundabout C-word joke. And hey, any artist that 30 Rock bothers to make a joke around must be worth something, right? I didn't much like what I heard, his output seemingly consisting mostly of soppy ballads, but this album showed up on several AllMusic editors' lists...
Goddamn right. There are overslow moments, especially on the back side, but there are also profoundly inventive moments, sounding honest to god like nothing else. Soaring harmonies, crushing guitars from nowhere, beastial beats, crystaline textures, and some of the strangest hooks you'll hear that manage to stay this side of catchy.
I'm always a sucker for lots of short songs, being a marker for the kind of batshit, stream of ideas, torrent of hooks rock that you get from the likes of Guided By Voices and The Unicorns. That holds up here: the original salvo of 8 songs totaling 12 minutes are exhilarating, evoking the incomprable Abbey Road medley in their MIRV'd deployment.
The obvious point of reference here is Zappa, with a similar plumbing of rock history, absurd imagery, and surplus of noise and energy, but I actually find this album more consistently surprising and enjoyable than any of Zappa's bent pop albums. There are shades of ELO, Eno, Lamb-era Genesis, Bryan Scary and Olivia Tremor control here, but this precedes all of those artists' most prominent work and outdoes them at some of their greatest strengths. I would be shocked if this album didn't influence most of those folks, and yet it is largely unknown in any music circles I know of.
There are lows, especially the plodding Michael McDonaldism of I Just Don't Know How to Feel and the opening (non-cool-jerk) parts of the soul medley, but the highs outweigh them: the shredding You Need Your Head, the singularly beautiful and propulsive When the Shit Hits the Fan, and whatever Flamingo is.
This is surprisingly close, but I can't quite drop the 5 bomb on something that has as many must-skip tracks on it. But the highs are as high as any album I've heard in a long time, a great hidden gem 4.5/5
You might like this if: you like adventurous, pretty, strange music that will keep you on your toes and demand repeated listens. At very least most music fans would be well served by spending 12 minutes listening to those first 8 tracks, which are pretty incredible*, especially since they predate everything they sound like
* minus Never Never Land, which serves mostly to set up the Tic Tic / You Need Your Head hammer drop
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