Electric Light Orchestra – A New World Record
It all started here. This was the first ELO album – in fact, the first rock album – ever given to me; my older brother introduced me to this one on 8-track when I was around five or six years old, and it pretty much set the pattern. Having only heard some of my mother’s easy listening records and the only album I truly had to my own name – John Williams’ Star Wars soundtrack – I immediately gravitated toward this rock music that sounded like it had a heavy-duty soundtrack incorporated into it, and I have favored that kind of music since. That could, in fact, best describe the kind of music I love the most – something that, if it never has been played by any sort of classical instrument, sounds like it could easily translate to that medium and sound majestic. Where this album specifically is concerned, though, it contains one of my favorite rock songs of all time, “Mission (A World Record)”, a very unusual, dark piece of music with mournful lyrics that seem to be sung from the vantage point 
of aliens observing life on Earth. Most people will be more familiar with this album’s singles, “Telephone Line”, “Livin’ Thing”, “Rockaria!” (another favorite, a humorous hard rocker that pays tribute to several classical composers) and “Do Ya”. This is my favorite ELO release from the 70s, and my favorite rock album, period. I just haven’t heard it get much better than this.
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- Tightrope (5:03)
- Telephone Line (4:38)
- Rockaria! (3:12)
- Mission (A World Record) (4:26)
- So Fine (3:55)
- Livin’ Thing (3:31)
- Above The Clouds (2:17)
- Do Ya (3:44)
- Shangri-La (5:34)
Released by: Jet
Release date: 1976
Total running time: 36:20
Relax. The backward voice that booms through the intro of “Fire On High” is simply saying the famous phrase, “The music is reversible, but time is not,” and just between you and me, the voice treatment and the phrase itself sound like a 
mixed results. The all-time classic “Evil Woman” gets old after a while, but I could listen to “Strange Magic” for a long time. The best song on the album has to be the ballad “Waterfall”, and as for songs I could have done without…well, it could just be the fact that I’m all too familiar with the south, but “Down Home Town” just grates on my nerves… 
This is the first ELO album which achieves a true orchestral sound by using session musicians. It also contains “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head”, one of the very few ELO singles I rate as highly as I do the band’s non-single album tracks; on this song, Jeff Lynne is almost a vocal dead ringer for John Lennon, and though this album was released six years before Lennon’s death, it’s still eerie to hear. It also contains “Laredo Tornado”, a spooky song driven by a mournful guitar phrase and one of my all-time favorites, “Illusions In G Major”, a song which is actually the most rock-oriented piece on the whole album 
despite its fancy title, and the mournful Eldorado itself in which Lynne strives for other extremes and almost achieves an operatic sound with his singing. Not only is the album on my Damn Near Perfect Album List, but it’s the point at which ELO caught on like wildfire – and not without reason. Highest recommendations. 
This is probably ELO’s most schizophrenic album, leaping from the use of the F word in “Oh No, Not Susan” to the lyrics of “Dreaming Of 4000”, which don’t know if they’re trying to be an environmental protest or some kind of vaguely Christian rock. ELO singer/guitarist/songwriter Jeff Lynne has since commented that he doesn’t know what he could have been thinking, and I have to agree with him there. But there are several good things about this album. The instrumental overture, “Ocean Breakup”, is as driving and ominous as “King Of The Universe” is…well, just plain weird. (Lovely to listen to, but weird.) “New World Rising” sounds like an embryonic “Mr. Blue Sky” in the making – same subject, and a very similar sound – and “Bluebird Is Dead”, in spite of the lyrics, sounds like something the Beatles might have turned out had they 
This is the album from which “Roll Over Beethoven” sprang, all eight minutes of it, and that’s not even the best reason to pick this one up. The most off-putting thing about ELO’s second album – and the first without co-founder Roy Wood, who walked out of the band after repeated arguments with Jeff Lynne over who was in charge – is the sheer length of every number. At eight minutes, “Roll Over Beethoven” is the third-shortest number on ELO II. “In Old England Town”, the hard-rocking opening piece, clocks in at just under seven minutes, and the longest song, “Kuiama”, runs a little over eleven. All of them are worth a listen, though the band’s studio technique still depended on grungy multiple overdubs of two cellos and a violin to achieve ELO’s titular orchestral 
Get ready for a very long stretch of ELO reviews, for these guys, as you probably well know, are my all-time favorites. This first album of theirs offers few hints of their future sound, and is probably the most atypical ELO album of all. The reasons for this abound, ranging from the crude studio technology available to the band at the time, to the schizophrenic feel of the album resulting from the presence of then-lead singer/musician Roy Wood, who had also fronted the Move. In many ways, ELO’s first album sounds much like a Move record – and in many cases the Move’s recordings were better engineered. That aside, the music is strikingly different enough to leave a lasting impression. Wood’s “Whisper In The Night” has an almost religious feel, and the early Jeff Lynne tunes “Queen Of The Hours” and “Mr. Radio” deliver his inimitable gift for composing a good song in 
the Beatles mold. Other pieces, such as the cello-saturated “10538 Overture” and “Nellie Takes Her Bow”, both of them also Lynne’s creations, leave quite a bit to be desired in terms of being able to discern voices, instruments, lyrics, or much of anything else. The final verdict – an uneven but promising collection.
This British double disc is quite a nifty item, despite the fact that it duplicated the entire contents of ELO’s first two albums (though that too is understandable, as those albums had been out of print in the U.K., never having seen a CD pressing). Why did I splurge on this? Because, like Afterglow, it has some neato extra stuff, including very interesting quadrophonic mixes of some songs from the first album (which, in stereo, simply reveal different aspects of the existing performances that are inaudible in the original stereo album 
This is a handy collection of some of the earliest recorded works by my favorite performer/songwriter in all of rock ‘n’ roll, Jeff Lynne of ELO fame. Even in the late 60’s tunes he wrote for his band Idle Race, it’s easy to hear the Lennon/McCartney influences – actually not so much easy to hear them, but impossible to miss them. In some cases, the quirky melodies and harmonies almost hit one over the head with their Beatle-ish-ness – at this early stage in his career, Lynne probably had yet to incorporate musical influences other than his beloved Fab Four into his work. Still, while much of the Move and ELO music on this album can be heard elsewhere (and, indeed, are reviewed elsewhere here), the 
This wonderful three-disc set arrived at the height of my ELO-worship, but I only wish I’d had my CD player at the time. Very seldom in my music review pages will you hear me complain about the quality of anything other than the music itself, but here I have to offer you, the consumer, a strong warning: if you’re going to get Afterglow, get it on CD. Even if you don’t have a CD player, get the discs and have someone make you a copy of them on tape and then put the discs away. The cassettes on which Afterglow was duplicated were hideously cheap, and I went through two cassette copies of the third and most important volume of the set before I finally bought the CD box set. That’s the end of my consumer warning.