Sunday, May 5, 2019

Electric Light Orchestra wrap up

"Well finally" I can hear you saying, if you've bothered to stick around. After all, why keep following a blog whose author can't start reviewing an artist without taking over two months to do it?  My witty humor and erudite ways, I suppose. 

Excuses or reasons?  Well, I burned out on listening to ELO music would be one.  Not sure which.  It just isn't collectively that good.  I thoroughly enjoy the occasional ELO song and forty minutes with the Greatest Hits album is doable, but thirteen albums turns out to be over my limit.  At least for ELO.  Anyway, I promised three more albums and I will deliver three more albums.

Secret Messages

Meh.  Except for Rock and Roll is King, which is a good song but on All Over the World.

Balance of Power

OK, so this actually has a couple pretty good songs.  Getting to the Point and Calling America are definitely worth a listen.  Endless Lies is OK but that could be personal history, and then the album ends with Send It which isn't bad at all, if a little too electronic.  I'd say this one is worth keeping in the rotation.

Zoom

So I was about to say some nice things about this album, including how much I liked the song Shangri La, and then I looked up the lyrics, only to find that it came off the album A New World Record.  Doing a little digging and somehow when I imported NWR into iTunes one of the songs (Shangri La) got listed on another album and one song (Above the Clouds) is missing altogether.  Weird.

So, Zoom is a pleasant album with nothing that really stands out and further proof that Jeff Lynne probably should have stuck with his decision after 1986's Balance of Power.

My takeaway from listening to thirteen ELO albums multiple times each, they weren't great but they were more than pretty good, less than very good.  There aren't many albums that are flat out un-listenable (Xanada, if you consider it an album).  On the other hand if you can crank out as many quality songs as Jeff Lynne did over two decades, I guess that puts you in the top ranks.  I could probably put together a triple length greatest hits that I could listen to regularly but other than A New World Record and my personally constructed GH, I'll probably stick to All Over the World when I need a Jeff Lynne fix.

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