Spending your career dressed like a butterfly and providing hair inspiration for Billie Eilish suggests a varied outlook on life, and on Space Force the result is a smorgasbord of collaborations which suggests the inside of Todd Rundgren’s head might look like an insane fairground run by the characters from Labyrinth.
Complex basslines underlay the synthesised, airy reverb of Puzzle and Head in the Ocean, broken up by the four-minute funhouse trip that is Your Fandango.
Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo guests on buoyant ska track Down With The Ship, which is followed by yacht rock sugar rush Godiva Girl. Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen helps Rundgren blow off some steam during STFU and Steve Vai closes the album, articulating his reverence for female mysticism through the medium of shredding.
Rundgren is possibly the only musician for whom a lack of any thematic coherency across a record doesn’t result in total disaster. It works - don’t ask me how.
