Hot on the heels of my longwinded Mellon Collie resequencing deconstruction, here's another album meant to be taken as a series of semi-discrete sides.
As with Corgan's, Rundgren's opus features a whipcrack series of tone changes and sonic swerves, going from soppy ELO pop to delierious Zappa 4th-wall-knocking to Bowie circa black country rock. I can't imagine what the hell people did with it in the 70's, when people settled in for some yacht rock and got pitched overboard into strange tides indeed. It's enough to make you rethink some of these art/rock/pop divides, so talented is Rundgren at the high / low of it all.
Frankly though, at times it just feels like he's showing off, and as a result there's not much soul to it all. The batshit interludes aside, everything feels very carefully planned and overly polished, but its a catchy, complicated, bewildering array of 25 songs that you'll enjoy spending a few listens digesting 4/5
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