The treasure chest of unheard and underappreciated bands must surely be running dry, what with us coming close to two full decades of CD-Age vault-plundering and with multitudes of internet sites cratedigging for the next forgotten masterpiece. So rather than continuing to look for those artists that sold 11 copies of their wildly influential debut record before imploding, perhaps we should be re-appraising bands that have been right under our nose all the time, almost annoyingly so.
Electric Light Orchestra is one of those ubiquitous bands that could be due for a second glance, a concept that briefly gained some momentum when "Mr. Blue Sky" all of a sudden became mandatory accompaniment for Charlie Kaufman-scripted films. However, a number of elements appear to be aligned against any sort of serious, non-kitschy ELO revival: 1) That absurd (yet appropriate!) name, 2) The incredibly Muppetish appearance of frontman Jeff Lynne, and 3) The group's all too easily parodied and carbon-dated sound, with its liberal use of falsetto and classical strings.
But the things that so firmly attach ELO to a particular time in music history (the 1970s) are also the things that make them so uniquely great. ELO existed at a point in music history where I was brought up to imagine the armies of rock and disco locked in a mortal battle like the Cubs and Cardinals, wherein the two flavors were mutually exclusive to apartheid-like extremes thanks to fun things like racism and homophobia and fear of keyboards. New- ave compilations have somewhat dissuaded me of that notion, but the field of what is now classic rock most assuredly remained a genre that surely treated the influx of disco's dance beats and string arrangements as straight heresy, and it was against this backdrop that ELO made its heroic stand.
Of course, Lynne's bold mixing of the disco and the rock seems almost accidental in retrospect-- books tell me that disco didn't peak until the mid-seventies, while the self-titled first ELO album hit stores in 1971, so the chronology doesn't quite match up. The original vision for the Electric Light Orchestra was rather coarsely telegraphed by their name: a merger of pop, rock, and classical music that yielded some pretty embarrassing early moments (including the Beethoven/Berry mash-up of "Roll Over Beethoven", not included here) and some pretty great ones (rock + opera aria = "Rockaria!", included). Early on, Lynne and co. made music that was sky-high on excess, drunk on the ambitious precedent set by the Beatles and the fact that, wow, studios have that many tracks to work with now?!
So it was pretty much serendipity when, by the middle of the decade, classical-sounding strings were suddenly a hot property thanks the burgeoning disco scene, Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" even echoing ELO's own attempts to update old Ludwig van. To Lynne's credit, he didn't follow his rock peers in mocking the new dance sound, but rather embraced the accidental resemblance, recording the group's best singles ("Evil Woman", "Living Thing", "Telephone Line") in an extravagant and non-condescending fusion of disco and rock. Only the Bee Gees were able to ride the wave of fashion more profitably, though each band's success should hardly be held against them...there's a reason why both are still heard on the radio incessantly.
All of the above makes ELO an excellent greatest hits band, as there's not a whole lot to be found in the deep cuts of albums like Out of the Blue and Face the Music. It's appropriate then, that there are numerous ELO greatest hits sets already available, with All Over the World only the latest entry. Truthfully, it's fairly interchangeable with the other comps already on the market, covering the band's less-rewarding backbeat-obsessed early period through the heady disco days described above through to the proggier late-70s work which birthed "Mr. Blue Sky" (and it's lesser-known sibling "The Diary of Horace Wimp"). Only two reasonable complaints can be lodged: the baffling omission of choice slow jam "Can't Get It Out of My Head", and the pointless just-barely-two-discs length.
It's a bit difficult to argue the cred-bolstering relevance of ELO in 2005, given that it's practically impossible to find a current band that sounds anything like Mr. Lynne's studio concoction. Pushed to the wall, I'd probably argue for the importance of ELO in paving the way for what we're now referring to as "hyperprog," the condition of idea/instrument abundance employed by bands like The Fiery Furnaces and Head of Femur. Yet none of these bands possess that essential quality of pure excess that sets ELO apart, that coke-infused sheen I associate with the 70s thanks to P.T. Anderson films and VH-1 documentaries. Based off this second-hand knowledge, Electric Light Orchestra are about as perfect a sound representation of that era as you're bound to find...and that makes them a band worth remembering.
