electric light orchestra secret messages

ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA SECRET MESSAGES MOVIE

Even Lynne must realize now how cringeworthy this one must be, as the only way to hear it is by locating a murky bootleg recording. They really taught the world to sing') that listening to it makes your ears hurt as your teeth would after eating a bagful of sugar. There is an even worse Beatlesque failure in the form of the one song that has never been officially released, the excruciating 'Beatles Forever.' This fawning tribute to the Fab Four is heartfelt but so painfully earnest and sickeningly sweet ('There's something about a Beatles song, that lives forevermore. The best moments of Jeff Lynne's career have come from repackaging Beatles licks into new songs that are familiar yet unique, but 'Hello My Old Friend' is a dismal take on 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane.' Clocking in at almost eight minutes, Lynne's tribute to his industrial hometown of Birmingham (a place that he adores so much that he abandoned it during the mid-1970s for LA not long after the money started rolling in) is about nine minutes too long. Of these tunes, the only one that merits any special attention is 'Hello My Old Friend' if only because of how utterly disappointing it is.

Seven of the eight songs that were missing from the original single LP release are now available, some in the form of bonus tracks on later CD reissues of the album and others on the multi-disc Afterglow anthology compilation. I've done this for you so that you won't have to, and trust me, you won't have to. Over the last few decades, all but one of those deleted songs have since been released elsewhere, so it is now possible to almost recreate the album as it was originally intended.

ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA SECRET MESSAGES MOVIE

Just as movie fans seek out the director's cuts of films, ELO aficionados may be hopeful that Lynne's 'authentic' lengthier version of Secret Messages is superior to the original album. But the record label took a machete to that idea, reducing the original eighteen-track collection to a single LP with ten tracks. Secret Messages was planned as a double album ala Out of the Blue. (Then again, it's not entirely clear that the world needed to revisit 'Year of the Cat' and 'Time Passages.') On the whole, not a particularly inspired collection. (The song was released several years before Enya's debut you can decide for yourself whether that makes this track innovative or something else.) The best thing here is 'Stranger', which almost sounds like something that Al Stewart may have done had he used ELO string arrangements. The band then goes on to rehash its usual motifs, including Velveeta pop ('Loser Gone Wild'), the obligatory homogenized tribute to fifties rock (the painful 'Rock and Roll is King'), a sort-of 'Don't Bring Me Down'/ Dave Edmunds hybrid ('Four Little Diamonds') and a soppy although acceptable ballad ('Take Me On and On').Īt the bottom of the barrel is 'Letter from Spain,' which has the feel of a third-rate Enya cover heard while receiving a root canal sans anesthesia. There is a brief moment during the opening notes of the album that almost sounds like Pink Floyd's 'Astronomy Domine', but any hopes of an homage to Syd Barrett are soon dashed as the title track settles into the now-customary big too-steady redundant ELO beat. Yet rather than allowing the band to revisit its glory days, Secret Messages would serve as a sort of a last gasp for an idea that had passed its prime.

But the 1983 follow-up record Secret Messages eschewed all new wave pretensions, attempting instead to turn back the clock to pick up where ELO's 1977 smash hit Out of the Blue had left off. But by the beginning of the 1980s, disco's rather ugly death and the emergence of new wave signaled that top-tier stadium acts such as the Electric Light Orchestra were being relegated to yesterday's news.ĮLO bandleader Jeff Lynne initially attempted to adjust to that seismic shift in popular music by sporting a shorter haircut and some riffs that were quite likely inspired by new wave acts such as The Buggles when he crafted the 1981 Time concept album. Review Summary: Out of the Blue? No, into the blah.Īrena rock and big production had defined much of the music scene of the mid- to late 1970s.

Electric light orchestra secret messages