In their New Wave power pop guise, Utopia played a kind of progressive pop. On the one hand, the songs have all the trappings of perfectly executed pop. The self-titled album that followed Deface the Music is remarkable in the way the catchiness just gets more infectious with every song. Your head is dizzy with hooks by the end of it. It's Exhibit A for those of us who want to believe that Todd Rundgren is a pop guy first, and only after that should you think of him as an experimentalist. Still, the side of him that's a daring risk taker is not to be simply shunted off to the side. While the songs on Utopia are undeniably first-rate pop, the song structures, chord progressions and harmonies are all very unusual to say the least. There's a fair bit of weird stuff going on if you're willing to sit down and get into a meditative frame of mind where you focus on nothing other than the music. You may need something to help you do this, if you catch my drift. The record takes you by surprise because it'll just register as Todd Rundgren doing another great collection of pop songs if you just put it on as background music while you're doing dishes or folding the laundry. This is why I think of it as progressive pop or progressive power pop. The hooks are the immediate lure, but there's a lot of ambitiousness in the music as well, which comes in through the back door unannounced. It's really a fascinating record, one that's not overly heady, unless you want it to be, in which case it will repay each successive listening sesh with something new, and strange, and lovely, and...
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