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 November 15, 2008 Todd Rundgren, Guitar Hero
Rundgren has also been at the forefront of video and computer technology. He produced and directed the video for "Time Heals," which was only the second music video MTV played when the cable channel debuted. He was the first rock musician to release music videos commercially, and his 15th album, No World Order (1993), was the first interactive CD. Listeners could load the disc onto their PCs and remix and reorder the songs as they wished. In 1998, he helped develop PatroNet, a subscription service that would make his music available immediately to fans for an annual fee. With all his varied interests, it is still as a songwriter and singer that Rundgren is best known. His third solo record, Something/Anything (1972), is one of the great albums in rock. It showed Rundgren’s command of nearly every idiom in pop music, from soul balladry ("I Saw the Light") to heavy metal ("Black Maria") and everything in between. He played all the instruments and sang the complex multitracked vocals on three of the album’s four sides, and produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered it. He went on to make 18 more solo recordings, as well as ten albums with his group Utopia. For a long time, Rundgren was known for his guitar playing, but his music in the last 20 years has often underemphasized that talent. His new disc, Arena (Hi Fi Recordings HF1001 36592), marks the return of Todd the guitar hero. The back-cover photo is a shot of the end of one of Rundgren’s fingers in extreme close-up. The finger is calloused from playing guitar, and on the evidence of Arena, Rundgren’s been woodshedding. I’ve caught him live twice in the last five years, and both times he accompanied himself solo on guitar. Although he was entertaining and his voice was in fine shape, his guitar playing was a little loose around the edges. On Arena, Rundgren’s guitar playing is at the center of the disc; he sounds revitalized. While it’s good news that Rundgren has regained his guitar chops, he’s never lost his talent for writing and recording good songs. His CDs have been remarkably consistent. Nearly Human (1989) was perhaps his last true masterpiece, but his discs since then have been melodic and complex, often on a par with his best work. The Individualist (1995) and his last disc, Liars (2004), feature great hooks, dense vocal harmonies, and an ease with technology that keep them from becoming robotic and distant. Rundgren’s use of electronic keyboards, drum machines, and other innovations in music has enabled him to control the sound of his recordings.
Perhaps the guitar also fit what Rundgren was trying to say this time around. As he did with Liars, Rundgren has channeled his anger into themes that have grown out of his reactions to current events. Liars looked at deceit in our lives, while Arena takes as its themes courage and cowardice. While Liars often used classic soul and Philly International as its sonic blueprints, Arena rocks harder, and the guitars convey the anger and occasional bile that Rundgren feels. Rundgren’s humor and his skills at songwriting and record production help him mostly avoid bombast here. The verse in "Mad" leads seamlessly into the more aggressive middle and chorus, where Rundgren expresses his frustration at the state of politics and culture: "Now I’m mad / This is more than upset / It’s as enraged as I get." "Mad" is a prime example of how he can perfectly dovetail melody and riff, harmony and distortion. The processed vocals and ringing guitars in the verse flow easily, but it’s the wall of snarling guitars in the middle and chorus that capture the spirit of this song, and of the album. "Mercenary," all loud guitars, is as overdriven as a Black Sabbath record. Rundgren spits out the vocal in biting death-metal style ("Just leave upon the table what / You’ve agreed to pay") as he targets soldiers for hire and their masters -- by which he means all of us. With its throbbing, multitracked guitar sound, "Weakness" recalls "Black Maria," the classic guitar rave-up from Something/Anything. Rundgren has rarely used flashy guitar for its own sake; on Arena, each solo is carefully developed and integral to the overall flow of the arrangement. Rundgren successfully channels AC/DC in the chorus of "Strike," mimicking both Angus Young and Brian Johnson. "Courage" could have appeared on Rundgren’s own Faithful (1976), while "Bardo," whose title and subject come from a Tibetan Buddhist concept of the afterlife, is reminiscent of such Robin Trower records as Bridge of Sighs. Rundgren is confident enough about his own work to return to ideas he’s used before, and he’s always borrowed shamelessly from others, never hiding it but always making it his own. Audiophiles will wish that Rundgren had recorded Arena in a real recording studio instead of on a MacBook with Pro Tools. Most of the bass lines are sampled or programmed, as are the drums, and the guitars sound as if injected directly into the board rather than played through a miked amplifier. It’s a tribute to his ear that the album sounds as lively as it does, but I wish it sounded like music being played in a real room. Despite the recording quality, which is certainly listenable, Arena is 13 songs by Todd Rundgren writing at or near his peak, and a late masterpiece. . . . Joseph Taylor
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Todd Rundgren has been a key figure
in rock music since 1968, when Nazz, the group he’d helped form a year earlier in
Philadelphia, released its first album. Since then he seems to have been rock’s
Zelig. He engineered the Band’s Stage Fright, and his extensive
production credits include key records by the New York Dolls (their debut), XTC (the
essential Skylarking), and the Psychedelic Furs (Forever Now). He also
produced one of the biggest-selling records of all time, Meatloaf’s Bat Out of
Hell (some of us try to keep mum about that).
With Arena, Rundgren
returns to "sing-along, guitar-rock kinda stuff," as he describes it on the
sticker affixed to the shrink-wrap. According to his 