Todd Rundgren has never been at a loss for clever ideas, but even so,
Space Force is a particularly ingenious project. Like its predecessor
White Knight, it's a collaborative effort, but the catch is it consists entirely of songs the original composer left unfinished --
Rundgren stepped in to give them a final polish. It's not an uncommon way of working. Essentially, it's similar to the role of a producer who will come in and push an artist over the finish line, but with
Space Force, it works in reverse: He solicited songwriters for their incomplete songs so he could bring them to life.
Rundgren works with a couple of up-and-comers here, ranging from his indie descendants
the Lemon Twigs to multimedia hip-hop artist
Narcy, but he generally turns to old friends, colleagues, and like-minded stars for their own idiosyncratic scraps. The results are naturally a bit scattered sonically, as any record featuring
Steve Vai and
the Roots would inevitably be, yet it's tied together by
Rundgren's aural aesthetic and sense of mischief. The latter comes into focus with "Down with the Ship," a novelty number spun out of a
Rivers Cuomo track sampling
the Skatalites's "Dick Tracy" that could easily have slid onto
The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect, where it would happily coexist with "Bang the Drum All Day." A lot of the album shares a similar retro-futuristic vibe with
Ever Popular while also echoing the post-psychedelic soul of
A Wizard A True Star, an unexpected and happy development. This sense of indulgence does mean that
Rundgren's impishness is dialed up to an extreme, surfacing on the absurd
Sparks romp "Your Fandango" and "I'm Leaving," where
the Lemon Twigs apparently gave
Rundgren a song designed to sound like a cut buried on the forgotten side of the double-LP
Todd.
Cheap Trick's
Rick Nielsen helps ratchet up the obnoxiousness with the wailing "STFU," while
Thomas Dolby sounds uncannily like
Roger Waters on "I'm Not Your Dog." All this sound and fury is good fun yet the heart of the album lies in lovely, ethereal moments like
Adrian Belew's "Puzzle" and
Neil Finn's "Artist in Residence," which both recall
Utopia at their soft rock peak, and "Godiva Girl," where
the Roots help ease
Todd back into Philly soul mode. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine