ADVENTURES IN UTOPIA

For a few years, Todd Rundgren's Utopia was an extremely good prog rock band. But once they solidified into the line up of Rundgren, Roger Powell, Kasim Sultan and John Wilcox, they immediately began drifting toward power pop. Excellently produced and extremely well played power pop, but pop nonetheless.

This album, ushering in the awful eighties, is almost completely devoid of the prog elements that made their previous albums so much fun. Sure, there are some good songs (Rundgren made a few of them into videos for a pre-MTV show he worked on with Mike Nesmith), but prog, uh-uh.

The best of this set are Caravan, and the two hardest rocking songs, The Last Of The New Wave Riders and Rock Love, that almost get ruined by a disco beat, but is too good a song to be kept down.

The worst song is Love Alone, which, with heavily layered vocals, brings to mind some of the dismal Queen eighties songs, where they mistakenly thought that layering vocals over a lame romantic ballad could bring back the success of Bohemian Rhapsody.

On a better note, many of these songs fared better in concert, where the band could stretch the songs out, and make them better.

2.5 stars, rounded up (because it won't leave enough room at the bottom for the albums to come).