Utopia
Swing To The Right

THE REVIEW

Everything perfect. From the clever cover to the music, not a wrong note, not a graceless passage, not an inferior melody.

The secret? What should have made every Todd Rundgren album a masterpiece, but instead, due to complacency, too much haste, rush, prolificacy, or presumption, often did not work: the combination of technical perfection in execution, the obsessive knowledge of various musical genres, the wit in blending these genres and composing new 'recipes', the total mastery of the recording studio, and the extremely high level of compositional skill.

Wanting to dissect each track, by the end of a single listen, you feel just like the chef who, after a delicious meal has been devoured, tries to explain to the clientele with a full belly, in detail, all the ingredients and preparation.

The ingredients, then, are always the same: "old prog" keyboards, nuances and passages (if not entire specials) of jazz-rock; hard-blues structures, AOR and FM choruses, surf tracks, soul frameworks, and power pop geometries. Missing are the Arena rock from the previous "Oops! Wrong Planet", psychedelia, and the typical vaudeville episode, replaced by the perfectly experimental funk rap of "Junk Rock".

For the rest, as we said, the difference lies in the way of blending the various ingredients, so that even the episodes that seem more predictable veer towards something else, different and better. This is the case with "Fahrenheit 451" (ex-surf) or "Only Human" (ex-soul). Less simple tracks are "Lysistrata", Californian pop campfire with electric guitars, "Shinola", continuous phrasing of old keyboards over a hard blues, and "One World", a final party between surf and gospel.

Even more ambitious, to keep it short, is the Warholian electropop of "For The Love Of Money", which was once a hard blues; the fusion between avant-garde, solid power pop, and keyboard prog in "Last Dollar On Earth"; the AOR chorus, pop verses, and accelerated jazz rock rhythm of "The Up"; the crossover between Kansas' prog rock and the FM of the initial title track.

Beyond everything, a record of great songs, which sounds very fresh (except for the keyboards, intentionally retro) even today. And which, despite using the same ingredients as sixty years of music, sounds original. And strong.