Photo titled "Envelope. No label. Flowers, students by school bus, a grave, etc." by E. Don Herd, c. 1960
I've long been fascinated by pop eclecticist Todd Rundgren - from his early power-pop days with the Nazz to his Laura-Nyro-inspired ballad albums to his totally bizarre '70s records like Todd, he has always done pretty much whatever he felt like doing. This kind of approach makes sense to me, but Utopia never made quite as much sense, because it seemed like Rundgren had found a collaborative group that was willing to follow the same kind of capricious muse. The band's other three longtime members, Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, and Willie Wilcox, contributed as equal partners in Utopia, each writing songs and taking turns singing lead vocals. And equally baffling is the fact that Utopia followed a similarly weird career arc - they started out as a dyed-in-the-wool prog-rock band writing crazy rock epics like "Singring and the Glass Guitar (An Electrified Fairytale)", but sometime in 1977, they turned into a power-pop band and never looked back.
By 1982, Utopia had done a lot of different kinds of records (including a whole album of Beatles sound-alikes with 1980's Deface the Music), but they hadn't made a straightforward "new wave" record. So they did that, as the skinny ties, blazers, and Ray-Bans in the cover photo of Utopia can attest. True to the band's chameleonic powers, it's an impressively high-quality set of pop songs composed in the jittery, synth-heavy '80s pop style, best exemplified on the two excellent singles "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" and "Hammer in My Heart". The record has a couple of nice Rundgren piano ballads ("Chapter and Verse", "There Goes My Inspiration"), but some of the best songs are sung by the other Utopians. The only exception is Roger Powell's unfortunate "Burn Three Times", a song with a cringe-inducing fast-food metaphor that actually includes the line, "I'm no burger king, I'm no pizza pie spinner / Don't come sniffin' round here for something to eat!"
Drummer Willie Wilcox sings lead on "Princess of the Universe", which I love in large part for its awesome title. It's the first song of the album's unofficial "Side 3", a set of five bonus songs that have always been included with Utopia without being considered part of the proper track list. The gang vocals on the chorus are one of Utopia's specialties on this album, as are the clever lyrics. At times, it's easy to forget that this is a group of older musicians pretending to be a new-wave band and not a first-rate record from a group of young post-punk upstarts.
"Princess of the Universe" by Utopia
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