Customer Reviews

Adventures in Utopia

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Utopia was an important band to me in the 80's. They are still an important band to me, although they have not released an album of all-new album since 1985's underappreciated "POV". Well, I do have the good memories, and "Adventures in Utopia" is one of my fondest memories of Utopia! This is an album of extreme diversity, which is one of its greatest strengths. Their are moments of pure catchy pop excellence, such as "You Make Me Crazy", "The Very Last Time" and "Set Me Free". Some lush progressive rock stylings on songs like "The Road to Utopia" and "Caravan". A bit of soulfulness with "Rock Love" and "Second Nature". And even a gorgeous synth-based ballad called "Love Alone", that shows off Utopia's fine vocal harmonies. The thing that made Utopia such a pleasure is that functioned so well as a unit. All of them wrote songs, traded off on lead vocal duties, and complimented (rather than interfeared with) each others instrumental talents. While many may think of Utopia as "Todd Rundgren's band", they were definitly an equal partnership, and this band just would not have the same "spark" without the excellent contributions of Kasim Sultan, Willie Wilcox, and their ever-imaginative keyboardist Roger Powell. Utopia was a creative and underrated band who never got the respect they deserved for the media. This album proves that point beyond a shadow of a doubt!

This is the second more commercial, pop-oriented Utopia album, after 1977's Oops! Wrong Planet, but of course, Todd Rundgren has never been a stranger to pop music, despite progressive/art rock tendencies and excursions.

Track 1, "The Road to Utopia" 5/5
This flirtatiously begins as a progressive track for the first minute and a half before turning into a pretty straightforward, beautiful pop song. "Beautiful" is no surprise. For a long time, it seemed that prolifically writing beautiful, catchy pop songs came to Rundgren as easily as breathing. That Rundgren didn't have constant radio hits is one of music's great injustices. Or maybe not. He might not have as consistently produced interesting music in that case.

Track 2, "You Make Me Crazy" 5/5
This track is a very interesting combination of a 60s pop song and new wave. A Cars influence can be heard, which is ironic now, considering that Rundgren is currently in "The New Cars". Great singing from drummer "Willie" Wilcox and interesting bass playing from Kasim Sulton. Sulton's bass on the prechoruses (and the way that Rundgren changes chords on the verses) makes them sound far more outside than they really are, and of course the third verse is just wonderfully outside overall. I love the melody in the prechoruses and the chorus, and the interplay between Sultan and the "background vocals" on the chorus, which have a subtle, odd flanging effect on them.

Track 3, "Second Nature" 5/5
Except for the discofied drumbeat on the chorus, this could have easily fit on Rundgren's Something/Anything?, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's a leftover song from that period. In any event, a typically gorgeous melody/harmony on a catchy tune. A bit short, but there's nothing wrong with short pop tunes.

Track 4, "Set Me Free" 5/5
A song wholly written by Sulton. This has great, unusual verses, where the chords, dominated by Roger Powell's Rhodes keyboard, build and change without repeating. In fact, I'm not sure there's any guitar on this track at all. The chorus makes you want to get up and dance and sing along like you're in a gospel church. Smokin' but relatively simple sax solo--I love the ending.

Track 5, "Caravan" 5/5
And talk about simple but effective, that's what the guitar riff on this song is all about. There's one ringing kinda dissonant note (maybe just dissonant because of the flange effect on it) towards the end of the phrase that makes it even better. Rundgren repeats it as an ostinato under the smooth verses while chord changes on top of it wax and wane the tension (especially with respect to that one note)--that's one of my favorite compositional devices. The choruses have a strangely attractive cheesiness to them. The bridge, which ends up being constructed like a concise, traditional jazz improv (and this is recurs in the outtro), is surprisingly heavy. I love the keyboard solo with the heavy effects. Rundgren does some killer guitar work on the outtro.

Track 6, "Last of the New Wave Riders" 5/5
The heaviness continues. But the song becomes almost a spoof (as we might have guessed from the title) when the vocals enter; it's very funny. Kinda Queen-ish. Still, this song isn't just a spoof. There's a great melody in the chorus and there are some unusual things going on structurally in the verses. The bridge is very much progressive hard rock, often retaining the Queen references. The overblown ending is very funny, too.

Track 7, "Shot in the Dark" 5/5
And then Utopia makes a Queen-ish left turn, first suggesting a Professor Longhair-like sauntering blues in the intro, played by Powell on the piano. But suddenly, things get new wavy again. The verses are orchestrated in a way that suggests alien reggae. Melodically and harmonically this is much more a traditional rock tune, but the orchestration and production make it much more.

Track 8, "The Very Last Time" 5/5
The vocals are oddly mixed a bit back on this track, but it's a great song. Pretty straightforward for Utopia. Beautiful choruses again.

Track 9, "Love Alone" 5/5
This has a really soulful chord progression, played beautifully by Powell, who is the only instrumentalist on this track, with great singing again from Sulton and the rest of the band on Queen-like background vocals. This would have been a great closer, but the album unexpectedly goes to--

Track 10, "Rock Love" 5/5
A disco party! This is another very tongue-in-cheek song, but very good and catchy. Very funny lyrics. Sulton really cooks on bass throughout, especially on the chorus. I love the chord progression and harmonies on the prechoruses. The end of the bridge/solo segueing to the prechorus is odd and genius. Don't miss the over-the-top scream from Rundgren near the beginning of the outtro.

I love this album as much today as I did when I received my first vinyl edition in 1980, before I realized what a masterpiece I had. The musical variety clearly demonstrates why Todd is such a sought after production consultant to so many other artists, and has an almost cult-like following of fans. Some might think that this collection illustrates why Todd has not had all the commercial success he so richly deserves, because it crosses and even pulls together different genres without a consistent style. On the contrary, his ability to appeal to fans of different music without compromising his artistic creativity in the name of commercialism is commendable. If you are looking for technical production that was innovative for the era, catchy tunes and lyrics as well as some that will make you think if you listen carefully, and a general album that has something for everyone, I highly recommend Adventures in Utopia.

It wasn't until I saw UTOPIA perform live that I cared about their music. This CD comes closer than any other to capturing the energy of their live performances, and it also features some of their strongest songwriting & best production.

'Last of the New Wave Riders' outdoes bands like Van Halen at their own game; 'Road to Utopia' (a killer in concert) recalls the best progressive rock of the 1970's and 1980's, and songs like 'Rock Love' even have a pounding dance beat to go along with a catchy melody & smart lyrics.

The lyrics are playful and never maudlin or dumb, ... very unusual in pop music these days. This CD will appeal to anyone who ever liked anything by Todd Rundgren, since it contains songs that echo Rundgren's strongest material -- but without sounding derivative.

My only criticism is tht the mix sounds dated; a bit thin, too much melody and not enough rhythm. But one can always crank the bass up on the equalizer and over come that limitation.

Probably the best melding of the "progressive rock" style of Utopia and the "power pop" style of Utopia. All the songs are power pop accessible but retain the sharp musicianship of previous progressive Utopian epics. Standouts are the up-tempo "Road to Utopia", the guitar/synthesizer duelings of "Caravan", the out and out metal ravings of "Last of the New Wave Riders" and the Boston-sounding "The Very Last Time." Also contains some send-ups of 'punk' with "You Make Me Crazy" and 'disco' with "Rock Love."

This is the album that god forgot! Better songs, production, playing and singing is hard to find in these days of computer-made music! This is something for the Queen - Jellyfish and Beatles lovers out there. With songs catchier than herpes at a groupies convention you cant go wrong! A must for everyone who's into MUSIC

Every song on this CD is excellent. Starts off with one of my all time favorite tunes, "the road to utopia". Surprised this one didn't get more air play - mimal play of Kasim singing "shot in the dark". This was a great band and they truly demonstrated it on this recording!

Actually this is the first Utopia album I've ever had. One of the main reasons is rarity. Over time a good chunk of Utopia's output,actually everything after their first two albums has gone out of print domestically and are only available as expensive import versions. So you can probably imagine how excitied I was when I was on a daytrip recently and located this CD,which was actually one of the Utopia albums I was looking forward to hearing. This was 1980 and at this point the career of the band and Todd's own solo career were very much in tandem. Because Todd had access to a band all the time in this case,particularly the very talented (and often unheralded) Roger Powell he was able to focus himself even more on arrangement and building different textures of melody and harmonic variations. Not that this was anything new for him but,at least by this point Utopia were a pretty straight ahead "pop" band. Now as everyone knows Rundgren isn't about to go willy nilly into something like this without a game plan. "The Road To Utopia" and the extended "Caravan" are the only songs on this album that have a prog rock flavor that was steadily drained from Utopia's sound over the years but all the same the production of the entire album was focused in another direction. This album is very much about very heavily harmonized synthesizers and keyboards working their way around very distinct types of melodies. On "You Make Me Crazy","Last Of The New Wave Riders" and "Shot In The Dark" there is a mild similarity to brittle,crisp new wave pop/rock in the style of The Cars. It needs to be noted however that the thick arrangements of these songs as well as the harmonic construction (Todd always borrowed heavily from doo-wop in this sense) don't possess the same brooding moodiness a lot of new wave in this era did. "Second Nature","Set Me Free","The Very Last Time" and "Rock Love" are all the highlites of the album,following Todd's own musical lead of the period with the thickly harmonized,hook filled Hall & Oates type rock n soul variation that he'd already made his trademark and continued to adapt over the years. Todd's love of doo-wop harmony really revealed itself in the half a cappella "Love Alone" which anticipates by about five years his solo album A Cappella. Because of the fact that this album is built so heavily around harmony,soulfullness and emotionally involving lyrics it doesn't possess nearly enough abstraction and obscurity to have much interest to the average progressive rock listener. But in terms of Todd Rundgren and his likeminded band always in a state of re-imagining themselves you can see how just plain good they're making their music sound.

Looking back 30 years after I picked this up on vinyl, I still get goosebumps. While this was my first exposure to Todd Rundgren and Utopia, it had a huge impact. I followed Utopia, and Rundgren through his career as a solo artist and as a producer with Patti Smith Group, Bourgeois Tagg, XTC and many more.

From Adventures in Utopia, the song Caravan is a jaw-dropping rock epic, a journey in its own right and the mightiest song of the bunch. Saw them play it live and it's one of the best performances I have EVER witnessed (by my count Rundgren broke his strings 5 times during the song). That's not to knock the rest of the album, which is a lot of fun too.

yow. you can download THE ROAD TO UTOPIA, CARAVAN and THE LAST OF THE NEW WAVE RIDERS...those make this album stellar stellar stellar!

the others are just filler that don't really bog the album down, but rather, get washed away as so much mulch. not bad.

but those three are GREAT!