Electric Light Orchesta – Out Of The Blue (remaster)
Out Of The Blue is, quite simply, one of the most iconic albums of the ’70s, hands-down. It seems that, despite its intricate arrangements and impeccable musicianship, this album will simply never have the rock critic cachet of, say, Dark Side Of The Moon. And yet these days, one hears more young artists coming out of the woodwork trying to achieve the sound of Jeff Lynne and company than one hears Pink Floyd sound-alikes. You can do the math there if you like.
This remastered edition adds only a handful of bonus material, largely because the original double LP takes up most of a single CD. (I would’ve been happy to go to two CDs, a la the remasters of ELO’s first two albums, but there’s not much indication that there was really enough material to go that route.) The one full bonus track that isn’t a demo or other form of outtake is the lovely “Latitude 88 North,” a song which, according to the notes, was partially written at the same time as the other Out Of The Blue tracks but just didn’t make the cut. Of the various bonus tracks that have come along since the Flashback box set ushered in this new era of “remastered with a few freshly recorded bonus tracks” activity, “Latitude 88 North” is the best one to come along since “Love Changes All” and “Helpless” (or, for that matter, Zoom). Even if it’s clearly a recent recording (at best, the song itself may be 30 years old, but the track itself is much more recent), it’s a great song that hearkens back to ELO’s glory days, and it at least sounds closer to that classic style than “Surrender” (from the remastered A New World Record) does. Bringing up the rear are an excerpt from a demo of “Wild West Hero” (which demonstrates great harmony, but lousy lyrics that were replaced in the final version) and the rousing instrumental “The Quick And The Daft”, which most certainly is a 1977 original – good material for serious fans and students of ELO’s work to chew on, but nothing that will really excite casual listeners.
Fortunately for casual listeners, one of the most iconic albums of the ’70s is still here, perfectly intact and remastered, and it’s never sounded better. The remastering isn’t so radical as to have me reassesing my favorite songs, but it’s nice to hear them cleaned up and sounding sharper than ever before. The booklet-style case is also a treat, with an extensive set of notes about the making of Out Of The Blue. There’s a standard version of this CD with a slightly pared-down version of that booklet, but the deluxe edition – bound like a little book, featuring the full liner notes and even a miniature replica of the original LP’s punch-out cardstock spaceship – is a real treat for fans of the band’s work. I’ll admit I just haven’t had the heart to punch out the spaceship and build it, though; I did that with the one that came with the LP, years and years and years ago, and lost track of that one; I think I’ll leave this one intact, and maybe when my own child is around the same age I was when I first heard this album, it’ll be punched out and put together.
Not a bad package at all, celebrating an album that means a lot to quite a few people, even those who would never in a million years profess to be ELO fans. Though I’d wager that the original release of Out Of The Blue created plenty of those as well.
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- Turn To Stone (3:49)
- It’s Over (4:08)
- Sweet Talkin’ Woman (3:49)
- Across The Border (3:53)
- Night In The City (4:03)
- Starlight (4:31)
- Jungle (3:53)
- Believe Me Now (1:21)
- Steppin’ Out (4:40)
- Standin’ In The Rain (3:59)
- Big Wheels (5:32)
- Summer And Lightning (4:15)
- Mr. Blue Sky (5:03)
- Sweet Is The Night (3:27)
- The Whale (5:07)
- Birmingham Blues (4:23)
- Wild West Hero (4:45)
- Wild West Hero (alternate bridge – home demo) (0:26)
- The Quick And The Daft (1:50)
- Latitude 88 North (3:24)
Released by: Epic / Legacy
Release date: 2007 (originally released in 1977)
Total running time: 76:18
One of the three most recently remastered ELO albums, Face The Music is long overdue for a fresh listen, being – arguably – the first album of the band’s golden years. It’s also the album with “Evil Woman” and “Face The Music” on it, which certainly doesn’t hurt. (Sadly, during the remastering process, nobody remembered to kick “Down Home Town” out of the original track listing.)
With any slate of back catalogue reissues, you’re already running the risk of the consumer saying “been there, done that.” But it takes talent to achieve the same effect when it comes to the added-value bonus material. Maybe that’s a little unfair; as with the other ELO remasters to date, 1973’s On The Third Day has never sounded better. The apocalyptic-sounding fusion of strings and the closest ELO ever came to heavy metal positively sparkles, and the liner notes finally give a little bit of insight into the making of the album; with its bizarre, quasi-Biblical themes, Third Day has never ceased to fascinate me. It’s territory ELO hadn’t ventured into before, and never ventured into again.
It’s not a total disappointment, since not everyone will have gotten that UK import (and since those bonus tracks didn’t show up on the North American version of the ELO II remaster), but aside from some nice liner notes and a sharper sound, hardcore ELO fans won’t find much new here that they haven’t heard already.
For the follow-up to 1983’s reasonably successful Information, rocker Dave Edmunds turned once again to Jeff Lynne not just for production help, but for the ELO frontman’s unique songwriting style. The result was Riff Raff, a 1984 album which further pushed Edmunds into a more modern style. Kicking off with a Lynne-produced cover of the Four Tops’ “Something About You”, Riff Raff is a bit of a mish-mash, veering back and forth between different songwriters (Edmunds himself only penned one song, while Lynne wrote and produced “Breaking Out”, “S.O.S.” and “Far Away”). Somewhat surprisingly, with Edmunds producing the tracks that Lynne didn’t produce, the “sound” is fairly consistent from song to song. Within that context, though, Lynne’s songs fare the best, again sounding very Secret Messages-era due in no small part to the presence of keyboardist Richard Tandy, with “S.O.S.” being the best of the three.
A completely different animal from 2003’s Confidential, Vaporware Soundtracks is the sound of a whole new, completely reloaded 8-Bit Weapon. Rather than remixing classic Commodore 64 game music, 8-Bit Weapon – now consisting of Seth Sternberger and drummer Stacey Superstix – is doing some infectiously catchy original numbers. The odd pairing of “micromusic,” using Commodore computers and a Game Boy Color, with live drumming gives some of this CD’s tracks a fresh surge of power – in fact, I found that on some of the tracks where there were no live drums, the pace almost seems to sag.
It’s not too often that I’m going to waltz in here and brag about the packaging of a CD, since it’s so frequently tangential to the contents of said CD, but given this disc’s retro-video game theme, it has the coolest possible case: the disc is black on both sides, and comes in a soft-lined floppy disk sleeve cut open at the top. The floppy sleeve comes in the traditional paper envelope, and by God, it looks like a 5 1/4″ floppy.
Originally devised as a band that would “pick up where the ‘Beatles’ I Am The Walrus’ left off,” the Electric Light Orchestra was well on its way to carving out its own admittedly unconventional niche when the band’s leadership was split down the middle. Stunned by the sudden defection of founding member Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne and company regrouped, brought in a few more players, and kept the band’s original mandate – a rock group with its own live string section – intact. The result, in 1972, was two vinyl sides of beauty running the gamut from heavy metal to near-classical rock to ballads. Now, some 31 years later, the result is two full-length CDs of that same beauty and then some.
The premise of this double-disc compilation is simple: various modern pop artists, most of them enjoying cult indie label status (and a few of them refugees from major labels too), revisit the songs of one of their musical heroes, ELO’s Jeff Lynne. Colorado’s own Not Lame Records has been teasing the heck out of this release for months, only to watch it be bogged down by politics (the father/son duo of Randy and Tal Bachman, each of whom were originally slated to contribute a song, pulled out) and delays (a printing error in the first run of liner notes booklets which caused the collection to slip well past its original pre-Christmas 2001 release date). And now that it’s here, was it worth the lengthy wait?
In the late 60s, one would’ve been hard-pressed to find a post-Beatles psychedelic power pop outfit more prominent in Britain than The Move. (How prominent? One of their singles was the first song played on BBC Radio 1.) So naturally, the members of the Move would’ve been crazy to knock a sure thing in the head and try something as drastically different as a live rock group with its own string section.
Now discontinued by Eagle Records, a small label which has unleashed a small slew of ELO live albums in recent years, this two-disc set is a compilation of live cuts as originally broadcast on BBC Radio’s In Concert series.