Todd Rundgren
Initiation

Todd Rundgren is well-known as a great producer, creator of complex and wonderful albums, multi-instrumentalist and experimenter, an eccentric character, unique in the world of pop and rock but, let's face it, he is—because he was born this way, and those are his roots—a soul artist first and foremost. Had he been born in the '20s, even if he had been just a decent pianist, he probably would have become the greatest white soul man ever...

The fault of albums like "Initiation" is not his, it's the '70s. Too much variety, too many drunken nights and drugs, too many cultures, those imported whole and those reinterpreted in any way possible, too many religions, too many styles, too many novelties for the youth world, and all within a short span, ten years or a bit more. And so, one man alone with his piano finds himself surrounded by drug addicts, gurus, pilgrims, visionaries, scientists, vagabonds, murderers, pop artists, mystics, and his old soul finds itself assaulted by psychedelia, rock, progressive, blues, dirty folk, acidic jazz... Caught in the middle of this chaos, the fervent and overly fertile mind of poor Todd is taken into a whirlwind of anarchy, not always genius, resulting in a soul mixed with psychedelia, root rock mixed with blues and surf, art rock with jazz and progressive, Hindu philosophy married with psychedelia and the most visionary sound engineering... He lets himself be seduced by everything, caught by every single suggestion. Without self-control.

While in 1975, with Utopia, he steps out of prog to embrace all of pop rock, and with great results, solo, the same year, with "Initiation," he completely fails. Even his old-style soul, from piano turned keyboard, has lost its luster. The one in the opening "Real Man" has an almost funky bass that contaminates it, along with a very clumsy space keyboard. The old-style lounge of "Eastern Intrigue" is soon overtaken by a mixture of unhappy musical "findings": vaudeville, cabaret, stuff for gaggà, and so on... The title track is a good jazz pop trapped inside a psychedelic rock cage: once again, a scraped piano would be worth five times these acid keyboards. "Born To Synthesize" is a blues of just voice (with artificial modulations). "Fair Warning" is an (almost-)all saxophone soul, for eight full minutes and gospel choir, whose last thirty seconds are the refrain from "Real Man" in fading (!).

If only the shouted rock of "The Death Of Rock And Roll" is saved, the final "A Treatise On Cosmic Fire" is a full half hour of instrumental, three out of four keyboard chapters, which may be visionary and too "high" for the reviewer in question, but perhaps precisely for this reason, it's almost unlistenable. Only the "fairy tale" first half of "The Fire Of Spirit - Or Electric Fire" could be saved. In the last chapter, the electric guitar ushers Todd into a vacuum-sealed hell without direction of noises and percussions...

An album frankly without head or tail and not even a bust. Todd may have initiated himself into some new belief, into the sect of who knows what, he may have finally met aliens, taken his first pill, or gotten his first personal computer, but we prefer him alone, with an old guitar or better yet sitting on a scraped piano. Do not proceed without a direction.