Album Review: State by Todd Rundgren

Forty-five years into a career that’s majored in encouragingly confounding detours, Todd Rundgren still displays scant partiality for the soft option. There are plenty of Todd-watchers who quietly pray that he’ll simply record another pop-rock album, with traditional instrumentation, of I Saw The Light derivatives. To wish for this, however, is to grievously misunderstand what makes Rundgren such a valuable anomaly among his peers.

Full Review >>

Todd Rundgren long ago seized his status as a maverick, and his unpredictability can be as maddening as it is invigorating. State, by some counts his 20th proper solo album (the count gets a little confusing thanks to odd detours like the two he took in 2011; covering a blues legend on Todd Rundgren's Johnson and re-recording songs he produced for other artists), is maddening and invigorating in nearly equal measure, but ever so slightly favors the latter. Rundgren remains a devotee of D.I.Y.

Full Review >>

There are a small handful of people who consider Todd Rundgren to be God. Or Godd, if you prefer. There’s a good reason: 1972’s epic Something/Anything?, one of pop rock’s most enduring and perfect double albums. It’s a record (or records, plural) where Rundgren proves, for once and for all, that he was a visionary talent, and quite capably, too, by playing every instrument on three out of the four sides, all of which are pure music nirvana with hardly any filler anywhere in sight.

Full Review >>