Todd Rundgren "The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect" (3.5*)

Todd Rundgren's tenth studio album is a close to perfect example of what happens when record company and artist stop singing from the same hymn sheet, due to a perceived lack of promotion for the artist’s preferred creative environment.

Bearsville, according to Rundgren’s view of things, wasn’t supporting Utopia (his keyboard and synthesiser heavy prog rock outfit), and while he’d managed to extract the band from their clutches the label still had some idea that solo Todd was a marketable commodity and weren’t about to let him go without extracting another solo record from him.

In such circumstances, on the other hand, one wouldn’t be expecting the artist in question to be spending a great deal of time and effort fulfilling a contractual obligation, and the Tortured Artist title probably delivers a fair indication of the way Todd saw matters.

With Art Direction, Engineer, Instruments, Producer and Vocals credits to Rundgren, the album was released in November 1982 and even produced a hit in the form of the infectious Bang the Drum All Day. All in all, given the background it’s a fair bit better than the listener might expect, though I’m left wishing he’d stayed right away from covering the Small Faces’ Tin Soldier. That’s not picking on Rundgren, by the way. Tin Soldier, for my money anyway, is one of those gems that’s almost impossible to cover respectably, let alone match unless, of course, you’ve got a singer with a fair degree of Stevie Marriott’s throaty heartfelt roar. Sadly Todd ain’t got it.

Or perhaps that’s the point. The pop sound that runs through the rest of the album might be heavy on the synths and is probably the sort of thing Todd could knock out in his sleep, and even running on autopilot there are a couple of fairly classy bits of pop rock here.

One of them is the opening cut (Hideaway), which might be painting by numbers but presents a rather interesting picture, as does Influenza, which is clever, but not too clever by half. Don't Hurt Yourself is pretty good advice, delivered with a veneer of sincerity and rather attractive layered vocals in sort of Hall & Oates territory, with There Goes Your Baybay inhabiting a neighbouring postcode.

The cover of Tin Soldier can only be described as ill-advised unless, of course, it’s in there to prove a point. If it is, and the point is the one I suspect he may have been making (look how far things have gone and what I’ve been reduced to) it sort of succeeds, but not enough to escape shuffle on past this one territory.

It’s fairly obvious Todd has a thing about Gilbert & Sullivan, which is where Emperor of the Highway is coming from. Mileages will vary according to your G&S tolerance, or willingness to listen to reasonable approximations thereof. Bang the Drum All Day delivered a hit, and while it bubbles along quite merrily the first time or three, repeated exposure on a regular basis is probably something to avoid.

The synths send Drive off down the hard rock highway in a pretty much take it or leave it manner. It’s not annoying enough to have me hit shuffle, but I wouldn’t go out looking for it either), and Chant provides a lively way out of the album, and it’s one that hardly sounds like a tortured artist at work.

As a collection of pure pop with a fair dash of synthesised soul Artist works well enough, not quite Rundgren’s best work, but under the circumstances it was never going to be. It mightn’t be a match for, say, Hermit Of Mink Hollow, but it’s not bad. Infectious in places, and enjoyable enough in its own way, but worth going out of your way to track down?

A slot is the five album collection I found it in is, I think, around the right environment. I shelled out the dosh for Hermit and Faithful, got a bit of a discount, and, on that basis, a Tortured Artist comes as a bonus.

Los Lobos "...And a Time to Dance" (4*)

Despite the existence of a brace of earlier recordings, Si Se Puede! (Yes, we can!) and Just Another Band From East L.A. (a.k.a. Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles) this, I guess is where the Los Lobos story really starts, folks.

That first title, a charity album with proceeds from album sales going to the United Farm Workers of America, looks to be a collection of traditional Tex-Mex instrumentals dates back to 1976, and the second, a similar collection which appeared two years later, was self-released. Both, as you’d expect, are available on CD, and we may well find ourselves setting out to track them down at some point in the future, but as far as the general public goes this is, to all intents and purposes, the start of the Los Lobos we’ve grown to know and love.

High school acquaintances David Hidalgo and Louie Pérez had bonded over an affinity for the likes of Fairport Convention, Randy Newman and Ry Cooder and spent a year listening, playing guitars, and experimenting with multi-track recordings of their own material before recruiting fellow students Cesar Rosas and Conrad Lozano to complete a core quartet that’s still together and functioning forty years later. The fifth member of the current lineup, sax and keys player Steve Berlin gets the co-producer’s credit here.

Hidalgo’s on record as crediting Fairport’s take on traditional English folk music as the inspiration for Los Lobos’ similar take on the traditional Mexican music they knew from their childhoods, and years of  playing weddings and dances in their own community sharpened their chops before they came to be noticed by the Hollywood hipsters, with their first major gig being an opening spot for John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten’s) post-punk outfit Public Image Ltd at the Olympic Auditorium in 1980.

Signed to Slash Records, the Los Angeles label that specialised in local punk and new wave bands and had major distribution though a deal with Warner Brothers, the band’s initial big label release was co-produced by T-Bone Burnett and Steve Berlin and garnered critical acclaim (voted best EP of the year in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll), attracting an A- from Robert Christgau and collecting a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Performance (Anselma).

It mightn’t have sold all that well (though 50,000 isn’t to be sneezed at) but the proceeds were enough to fund a van that allowed them to tour more widely and establish Hidalgo and Pérez as a long term writing partnership. Seven tracks, with the duo contributing three (Let's Say Goodnight, Walking Song and How Much Can I Do?) along with Cesar Rosas’ Why Do You Do and three covers set the pattern for subsequent releases.

While long term fans may well have most of what’s here on compilations $7.99 at iTunes is reasonable, and the EP’s inclusion in a Warners Original Albums series (five titles for around $30 though I picked this set up for $20) makes it an attractive proposition if you’re inclined to indulge those completist tendencies.

An accordion-driven Let's Say Goodnight kicks things off with a rocking surge, Walking Song might have slipped past the anthologisers but rocks along as a sort of blues-based polka and the cover of Anselma, as noted, was Grammy material and still turns up in the concert setlist from time to time close to thirty years later.  Ritchie Valens’ Come On Let's Go sets things in place for the band to pick up the soundtrack gig for the La Bamba movie, How Much Can I Do? sits rather nicely in the same territory, as does Why Do You Do and the accordion’s back to the fore for the cover of Don Santiago Jimenez’ Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio that winds things up with a lively crossing the border two step.

As a debut, it’s promising enough, but there’s no warning of the imminent leap forward that would come with How Will the Wolf Survive. Start from somewhere else and then head across to here and you may well be disappointed, but take a gander at the title. As a good time dance album, this works rather well, and works a treat with a chilled article and good company. There is, after all, a time for such simple pleasures.