Listmeister listens -- Electric Light Orchestra

[Listmeister]

Now we come to a double album, considered by BEA to be the best of Electric Light Orchestra's albums.

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Out Of The Blue by Electric Light Orchestra
BEA Ranks: 1977: 19th (between Talking Heads 77 and The Idiot by Iggy Pop)
1970's: 148th (between Hemispheres by Rush and Superfly by Curtis Mayfield)
All Time: 601st (between Hemispheres and Wowee Zowee by Pavement)
Ranked highest by: harmony, #1 of All Time

We have a lot of music to get to, so let's get right to it.

Side 1 presents the band at it's most balanced. It's five guys (the cellos are almost absent) playing at their best and working well with each other. It starts out with "Turn to Stone," which is mainly a call and response between Jeff Lynne and falsetto-singing other vocalists. The whole band, bass, violin, keyboards, each gets their moment of glory in this showcase-the-band piece. This is followed by "It's Over" and then "Sweet Talking Woman". Lynne's production style has by this point developed into a distinctive sound, and you hear the occasional electronic effects in both songs. "Across the Border" is one of their best rock songs, which goes from a sci-fi intro into one of Lynne's story pieces.

Side 2 starts out with a classical strings intro followed by killer guitar riffs as they start "Night in the City". "Starlight" is a sappy 70's pop ballad. You can see Lynne in the control both cranking up the schmaltz knob. "Jungle" is loaded with jungly sound effects with a funk rhythm. "Stepping Out" is an unremarkable ballad.

Side 3 is called the "Concerto for a Rainy Day." I had to listen to it twice to see if I could find anything that unifies the four songs on this side. (They're all about the weather, duh.) First is "Standing in the Rain," which builds to several crescendos before getting into the actual song. After that, the Concerto goes on, with each song moving into the other. "Big Wheels" is a balladic narrative link between the songs before and after it. "Summer and Lightening", which used actual sounds from actual weather, has particularly interesting sonic effects. "Mr. Blue Sky" is often named as a favorite ELO Song. The electronic vocal effects (which were newish in 1976) contribute, but I think it's just because it's good, solid, ear-worm of a rock song. Then, when you think the song is over, it explodes into choralic majesty. One of ELO's best moments.

Side 4 starts with "Sweet is the Night," which has amazing falsetto vocals and harmonies. "The Whale" is an instrumental piece, showcasing ELO's inimitable style. "Birmingham Blues" is a fantastic pop song, that ought to get more airplay on the classic rock stations. "Wild West Hero" slows it down for the final bit.

For me, the album is too long. Double albums are hard to fill with good solid material end to end, and this one didn't quite make it. At least one song on each side is unnecessary. While all the songs are good, not a high enough percentage of them are great; and there's not enough variety between tracks to keep things interesting. It's a dip in quality, but (spoiler alert) they do recover.

My version of Out of the Blue would be:
Side 1:
Turn to Stone
Sweet Talking Woman
Jungle
Across the Border

Side 2:
Night in the City
Sweet is the Night
Birmingham Blues
Summer and Lightening
Mr. Blue Sky

Listmeister ranks: 1977: 18th.

[Listmeister]

It was 1990. My girlfriend and I went on a road trip, and naturally she brought along some cruising music. Three albums got played over and over: Ratt's Out of the Cellar, and two by Electric Light Orchestra: Discovery and Time. She let me borrow the ELO tapes. Or have. We broke up soon after, and I never got a chance to return the tapes. Eventually I wore out Time and bought a new one.

Thanks, Micha.

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Discovery by Electric Light Orchestra

BEA Ranks:
1979: 26th (between Lodger by David Bowie and Sheik Yerbouti by Frank Zappa)
1970's: 309th (betwen One Size Fits All by Frank Zappa and The Scream by Siouxsie & the Banshees)
All Time: 1,420th (between Time (the Revelator) by Gillian Welch and From Her to Eternity by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)

Ranked highest by Clouds2095 (5th All Time)

I'm going to get this out of the way at the beginning. The album has been nicknamed "Disco? Very!" by ELO fans. The Disco-ness is very apparent on two or three tracks, Shine a Little Love and Last Train to London, (and, to a lesser extent, On the Run). These tracks are very disco, it's true, to the point where you hear it and you want to point at the ceiling, and then at the floor, and then at the ceiling again, and so on. But that's not all there is to the album, there is amazing keyboarding, cool sounds, and some of the best lyrics Jeff Lynne has ever written.

The thing about albums that fade in is, you never know what volume level to set your speakers at until the song is well underway, and then you have to start over. Minor complaint, but every single ELO album has done that, since, I think, Third Day. 'Shine a Little Love' hasn't aged well. It's too 1979, too BeeGees, too disco. 'Confusion' has excellent keyboards and cool production gimickry, producing some interesting sounds. The reverb on the word "Confusion" almost sounds like auto-tune, except this was 20 years before auto-tune was a thing. 'Need Her Love' never made any impression on me, no matter how many times I heard it. Hearing it again today, still nothing.

The Diary of Horace Wimp' is the funniest song in the ELO catalog.
"Don't be afraid / Just knock on the door / But he just stood there a-mumblin' a-fumblin' / Then a voice from above / Said "Horace Wimp / Is this your life? / Go out and find yourself a wife! / Take a stand! / Be a man! / And you will have a great life planned!" (You can do it! Horace Wimp!)"

'Last Train to London' is a good pop song, but like 'Shine a Little Love' it suffers from '79-itis, as mentioned before. 'Midnight Blue' is a much better ballad than 'Need Her Love'. It has a haunting melody with lyrics that are sappy in a good way. 'On the Run' is also sort of disco-fied, but not to the point where it's distracting. It's a good dance tune, but it has elements of 60's pop and classical thrown into the mix. Unlike 'Shine a Little Love' and 'Last Train to London', it's not pure disco.

'Wishing' starts with whistling, so that's new for the band. Jeff applies heavy reverb to every voice except his own. It's a mellow song, that lulls you. And then suddenly, BAM-BA-BAM the heavy drums start from 'Don't Bring Me Down'.

For a long time, 'Don't Bring Me Down' was my favorite ELO track. It's one of their hardest rocking and one of their best lyrics. Each time they sing "No no no no no, woo hoo" they do it a little differently, with different harmonics. Best line: "You're looking good just like a snake in the grass / One of these days you're gonna break your glass." The album ends with "I tell you once more, before I get off this floor, don't bring me down. [dropping of the drumsticks]."

What do I say about the album as a whole? The thing is, I like Disco. I first got into popular music in 1978. I was nine, way too young to go to an actual discotheque, but I heard the music. It sounded like fun. I made it sound like there were a few tracks that were specifically Disco, but really, the album has a fairly unified sound. There's falsettos and reverbed vocals, their usual excellent instrumentals. Jeff's lyrics are better than ever. If you hate disco, check it out anyway, just skip 'Shine a Little Love' and 'Last Train to London', those are the worst "offenders". If you don't hate disco, it's an awesome a really groovy album.

Listmeister ranks 1979 2nd; 1970 23rd; All Time 74th.

[Romanelli]

I know from reading your review of this that Discovery has a special place for you. I hope I'm not sounding mean here...if I am, I'm sorry. Just my thoughts on the album.

The term "Disco-Very" didn't come from fans...it came from ELO's keyboard player, Richard Tandy. Kind of a big difference there...,but disco is not the issue I have with this album. I like disco, and I had no problems with artists who embraced it and started incorporating it...ELO, The Rolling Stones, McCartney, etc. And Lynne didn't make a disco album. He made an album with a couple of disco influenced tracks. Fine with that.

My problem with Discovery (and everything after) is that Lynne had made a decision to pretty much abandon what ELO had been formed to do: meld classical elements with rock music in the context of a band. He had made some headway over the years on tracks like "Ma-Ma-Ma Belle" and "Boy Blue" and "Tightrope". By Discovery, he was making albums more as a producer than anything else. ELO was already down to a 4 piece synth band, and it would soon be basically a duo with him and Tandy. The adventurous spirit of ELO's music was gone. And by making ELO ordinary musically, it brought to the forefront the thing that was always Lynne's greatest weakness: lyrics.

"Horace Wimp"...sorry. I have to disagree strongly here. When I heard this song, I knew that ELO was over. Gimmicky, overly poppy, and I swear...I wrote lyrics like "Horace Wimp, this is your life / Go out and find yourself a wife" when I was 10 years old. And note that it was not a hit in any way in the US...this is the kind of song that simply will not work here. "Confusion" is so dreadful...every time I hear the intro, I picture Liberace playing it, and for me, the effects are dumbfoundingly overdone. "Don't Bring Me Down" was written as an afterthough, and is a track that shows Lynne's ability to pretty much mindlessly write a hit ("Don't bring me down / Gross"...what the hell is that supposed to be?) If you have the ability to write such better quality hits than this...then why bother writing this?

The best track on Discovery for me is "Midnight Blue"...and I wouldn't rank it in ELO's to 20 songs. I grew up a big fan of ELO...and I have never found anything redeeming about Discovery. For me, this album ranks below even Balance Of Power and the ELO Part II fiascos.
_________________
May we all get to heaven
'Fore the devil knows we're dead...

[Listmeister]

Brother, you are NOT going to like my reviews of the next few albums.

[Romanelli]

[Rhett]

So, TIME, amiright?

[Listmeister]

I"m sure you're wondering, as we approach the 1980's, what is going on with Roy Wood?

Super Active Wizzo by Roy Wood Wizzo Band
1977 Rank: 613th (between Fourplay by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Playmates by Small Faces)
1970's Rank: 6318th. All time: 55,628th
Ranked highest by: Leonard, 33rd from 1977.

Roy changed the name of his band again, so I almost missed this one. Actually had to backtrack to get it. Chronologically, it came out a little before ELO's Out of the Blue. The band was Roy, Dave Donovan on drums, Rick Price on steel and electric guitars, Billy Paul on saxophones (alto and baritone), Bob Wilson on trombone, Graham Gallery on bass, and Paul Robbins on backing vocals. Roy is credited with every instrument except drums, so it's impossible to tell who played what.

I've gone on record as confessing that I don't like jazz, and (as I always add) I say that to my shame. When I listen to jazz, I keep wanting them to get to the freakin' tune already, but they never do. Wizzo was formed, according to wikipedia, so Roy could fulfill his "more jazz-oriented ambitions". Except for the bits with vocals, this album is way too jazzy for my taste. Now, it doesn't sound like traditional jazz, it's way too electronic for that, but the music form is much more jazz than anything else. It sounds like disco in places, like funk in places, even like country in a few spots.

Higihlights include the steel guitars of 'Waiting at the Door', Donovan does a really good drum solo toward the end of 'Another Wrong Night'. The lyrics of 'Earthrise' is pretty interesting.

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On The Road Again by Roy Wood
BEA Ranks: 1979 638th (Between Hacienda View by Linda Lewis and More Miles Per Hour by John Miles)
1970s 6,512th; All time: 57,336th.
Ranked highest by Leonard (48th of 1979)

This album was not released in the UK, for some reason. Wikipedia has little information on it. Unlike other Roy Wood albums, which seem to have been designed around a musical theme, this one does not mention one. Whatever his intentions, it would have been a really good road trip album.

Most of the album is 1970's rock and roll at its best, in the style of BTO or Deep Purple. Of all Roy's albums so far, this one has the least variation in musical style.

Exceptions are 'Keep Your Hands On the Wheel' and 'Jimmy Lad' which are a pleasant mid-tempo ballads (and 'Jimmy Lad' includes bagpipes). 'Colorful Lady' is the most Disco-oid of the two albums.

In the late 70's, pop music was dominated by the two trends of Disco, Wimp Rock ("Easy Listening" I think is the technical name.), and, by 1979, Punk was starting to build a presence on the radio. While ELO was being pulled toward Disco, Roy Wood's output stayed (mostly) away from those trends, and as such, should have been really refreshing in its own time. It's a shame that, for whatever reason, Roy's music was still not getting any airplay or recognition, because I think it could have had a place on the musical landscape of the 1970's. He deserved better. He would not release another album until 1987, after ELO had pretty much exhausted itself.

[Listmeister]

Time. We'll get to it. But before ELO recorded their next studio album, they participated in an early 80's trend of movie soundtracks being produced by one band. "Flash Gordon" by Queen was the prototype of this process, and in 1980, ELO got their own movie musical to play with.

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Xanadu (Soundtrack) by Olivia Newton-Jo... Orchestra

BEA ranks: 1980 78th (between Kjett and Empires and Dance by Simple Minds)
1980's: 640th (between Kjett and Avalon Sunset by Van Morrison)
All Time: 3,892nd (between Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head by Jordaan Mason and the Horse Museum, and Love by Love).
Ranked highest by: TrekkiELO (14th of All Time)

They didn't get the whole album, they got most of Side Two. Side one was songs that Olivia Newton-John (the star of the film) sang in the movie. Side two was mostly songs from the sound track that weren't sung by anybody visible, (like in the beginning, when all the muses are coming to life, ELO's "I'm Alive" plays in the background. The last song on side two is the title song "Xanadu", which is ONJ singing along with ELO.

The classical strings was not a big presence on their last album "Discovery", and by the time of Xanadu, they were gone completely. Mik Kaminski, Hugh McDowell, and Melvyn Gale, the violinist and two cellists, had been "dropped from the line-up" as wikipedia delicately puts it. The classical touch is missed.

In the interests of admitting my biases up front: I love this movie. It's effects, costumes, sets, plot lines, all encapsulate that moment when the 1970's turned into the 1980's. I'm also a huge fan of Olivia Newton-John's work. "Let Me Be There" and "If You Love Me Let Me Know" (which, I admit, might be the same song), are in my Best Of All Time song list, as is 1979's "A Little More Love" and a couple of the songs from Grease. Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra are not an obvious pairing, and I'm not even sure it works. But what the hell, the songs are great separately.

Side One includes "Magic" and "Suddenly", both of which were hits in 1980. All the songs on side one sound like typical Olivia Newton-John songs, that is to say, awesome because she has a beautiful voice. "Suddenly" was a duet with British music legend Cliff Richard, and "When You're Away From Me" is a duet between ONJ and MGM musical legend Gene Kelly.

"Dancin'" is the most interesting song on side one because it's a back-and-forth mashup of ONJ singing with a 1940's swing band on the one side, competing with the Tubes doing an urban, gritty (looking) "current" song "I Won't Take a Backseat". In the film, the 1940's stage and the urban dancing move closer and closer until they merge into one scene and one song.

So you flip the record over after "When You're Away From Me", and after listening to Olivia for 20 minutes, you are jolted (no pun intended) by the Electric Light Orchestra. They plow into "I'm Alive." The late 70's ELO sound is firmly established by the last few albums, and hearing "I'm Alive" you immediately go, "yup, that's an ELO song."

"The Fall" and "Don't Walk Away" are two Jeff Lynne ballads. Now, in the film, "Don't Walk Away" is a song used during a Don Bluth-animated sequence where the lead couple (Olivia Newton-John and the main guy) turn into animals and chase after each other to demonstrate, I guess, the universality of love. "Don't Walk Away, don't say goodbye, don't turn aroiund, don't let it die. When shadows fall, when day is done, all through the night, all of my life. Don't walk away." is the repeated refrain. Then comes "All Over the World", a pull-all-the-stops-out rocker. "There's gonna be a party all over the world!"

The finale' for the album and the film is the title song. In the film, Sonny, the hero, has built his dream palace, a roller disco called Xanadu. In the grand opening, ONJ sings with a band (ELO), the theme song of the place. "An everlasting love, and you're here with me eternally" expresses the timelessness and mythological origins of the place, despite the fact that roller discos where not exactly a timeless phenomenon. Every year, people think that what's popular this year will be popular for ever. Why shouldn't a roller disco last for ever? Why couldn't it be a metaphorical heaven? Roller discos are happy places, fun places, and Xanadu is the place of eternal joy. And when Olivia Newton-John says that, backed up by the Electric Light Orchestra, you believe it.

When soundtrack albums appear in an artist catalog, it's a tricky thing to place it in the band's evolution. The Parlophone version of Help! demonstrates two steps from Beatlemania to Rubber Soul and everything that came after, that is, you have Beatles For Sale, then Help! side one (which is the songs from the movie), Help! side two, which is other songs, not from the movie, then Rubber Soul. Side Two shows just enough artistic development to bridge the gap between the movie songs and Rubber Soul.

With ELO's contribution to Xanadu, you have a sense of calcifying. The band's sound is distilling to its essence. This is not necessarily a bad thing. When your band has a very specific sound, you can make an amazing album if you know what to do with it. The constraints of the soundtrack format, of having to make songs that fit into the context of the movie, does not really work with ELO's sound, but the songs themselves still sound good, because ELO is just about at the top of its game.

Listmeister Ranks: 1980: 2nd, 1980's 14th; all time 81st.

[Rhett]

The ELO stuff of Xanadu is nice and tight. It's weird to have it one the album with all the other stuff, even though the other stuff is all pleasant enough.

As for the film, I saw it when it came out and what I'm willing to say about it is that the Sgt Pepper film is worse.

[dihansse]