Jeff Lynne's ELO - From Out Of Nowhere

Well, Jeff was always influenced by The Beatles and all of their classic early 60s albums were around 30-34 mins? Perhaps Jeff feels that in the main, people appear to have far less patience to listen to complete albums these days than they once did. I personally, never liked the 'extended album' format that arrived with the advent of cd... artistes attempting to cram as much music as possible on the new cd format, often fobbing off substandard work as 'bonus tracks'. By the end of the album I was often bored stiff.
With listeners' attention spans ever diminishing, perhaps Jeff has once again come around to thinking the length of those early Beatles albums had it about right. That less is more?

 

Nice, I enjoy the last one.

 

Speaking of loops, it sounds like he's stuck in one. I get that bands/acts can have their own sound but Lynne really hasn't changed anything about his in 37 years, except his ELO sound is now fully enveloped in the modern digital recording world and sounds boxy and harsh. McCartney's last couple of albums suffer from the same problem.

The last great ELO album for me was Out Of The Blue but I do like most of Time.

 

I certainly think Jeff hasn't been exactly vastly stretching out with his most recent albums. I can understand a lot of the criticisms. I like the new song and the AITU album from 2015 well enough, but acknowledge it seems to be stuff Jeff can write in his sleep. Which is amazing, that he can do that seemingly so easily. But a little more stretching out musically and sound-wise would be nice.

Having said that, I'd say if your cut-off for liking ELO is 1977 (plus most of a 1981 album), meaning you don't have a strong affinity for Discovery, Secret Messages, Balance of Power, Zoom, or Alone in the Universe, then I'm not sure what you would expect from a new 2019 album. If a fan told me the last great ELO album was OOTB from 42 years ago, then I'd tell them the ship has clearly sailed on the likelihood of enjoying another new Jeff/ELO album.

I'd love something more epic from Jeff; I think "Zoom" was a masterpiece, but AITU and this new 2019 single sound mostly like solid outtakes from that album. Having said that, he's more intact vocally and otherwise than a lot of his contemporaries from the 60s and 70s. At least his stuff doesn't require some level of smoke-and-mirrors like Brian Wilson stuff (which I often still like, to be clear), and Jeff's stuff is still more enjoyable than recent McCartney output (both compositionally and especially vocally), where I have to do a deep archaeological dig to find some morsels that are interesting.

 

Some of the late era bonus tracks Jeff released over the past decade or so, like "One Day", "Forecast", "Cold Feet", "Point of No Return", and even back to "Latitude 88 North" are better than hunks of AITU; he could have easily taken all those outtake scraps and formed a surprisingly solid "new" album.

 

That can be the fun part with making your own compilation of a band. Piecing together your favorites from the "big" albums but surrounding them with lesser know album tracks or bonus tracks.

 

I wasn't expecting much at all to be honest. I think his songwriting is ordinary now and I don't like his recorded sound. His voice is still pretty good which is amazing considering his age but he's never been a screamer, so he's probably looked after it. Unlike McCartney who I now find virtually unlistenable more often than not.

I find Discovery patchy, Zoom boring, Secret Messages very boring and Balance Of Power boring and bland. And I struggle with the sound of Lynne's production (in particular that bloody drum sound of his) on albums like Cloud Nine, Flaming Pie and his Tom Petty albums, as well as Free As A Bird and Real Love. For me, he did some great work in the 70s but not so in the 80s and beyond.

 

Macca, hasn't really made anything worthwhile since 'Press To Play' even JL couldn't save him.

AITU is a masterpiece and a landmark wholesale change in style, even compared to 'ZOOM' that produced some of his best work since AT . This latest release sound like it comes from around 1982, it has a little influence from that era. It also has a little of this track

 

Just saw this is coming, and hoping for the best. Been a fan since the Idle Race days, but it's hard for me to get excited about new music from him when he refuses to bring an entire band into the studio. The music suffers in the long run. Of course I will buy the vinyl version of it, as I have everything he has ever released. Please be a good one...

I think today I will just go blast "Looking On" and ELO 2!

@BillWX thanks for starting this thread!

 

It has a very Seventies feel to it, perhaps mid late sixties feel too. The ship now looks a bit battered as the years have rolled on, now looking smaller like an MP3 player rather than a vinyl Jukebox .

 

Mostly agreed - though I think of Zoom as 'very good'. (Time is Jeff's high water mark for me.)

Jeff Lynne is a musical hero of mine. I'm truly happy he's putting out music. But his post-1986 minimalist approach to rhythm lacks energy, and is extremely same-y at this point. I listened to Free As a Bird the other day, and those first two snare hits reminded me - "Oh yeah, Jeff Lynne produced this".

To his credit, Zoom does have energy. But just compare everything after Balance of Power to the drums on Time, Xanadu, Discovery or A New World Record. Live drums should be impactful.

 

I think it hardly matters, when you consider that he has been probably bashing out ELO material, as soon as the rest of them had left the building. It is clear that it was JL & RT at the core of the band. A band wouldn't be JL it would be everyone else. I would consider that the small minority refuse to move past OOTB and MBS. ELO has made more albums since 1983 up until 2019 than they did between 1975 -1979. If we go back 51 years we can hear that JL sound evolve via Idle Race, Move, ELO, Wilbury,Solo and JLsELO . It's the same JL over 51 years. This new single is fresh, in a retro fashion that has that 1982 era influence of 'Helpless' and 'Love Changes All' . He can do it all himself and it sounds great.

 

Nice post, and I love Zoom as well (had other musicians on it). Was going to the show from the tour that was suppose to support the release, but ticket sales were not good and of course the tour was canceled. They should never have tried to put him in arenas and amphitheaters at that time. His popularity was not strong enough. I even told the label rep that was a mistake, oh well, nice to see things have changed for the better!

 

Been listening to ELO since early 80's when I was introduced to "Out Of The Blue".
New single sounds great, I'm hoping it's not the opening track of the new album in the same sense as "When I Was A Boy" was on Alone In The Universe. In that case it will unfortunately be the best track on the new ELO album. Great the man is still at it. Not many have achieved what Jeff has.

 

I'm not complaining. Instead, I feel kind of lucky to get another 10 songs from this artist. I guess there have been periods of time when songwriting came easier, and I'm happy he's not wasting any time waiting to get these tracks released.

"Long Wave", on the other hand, is an entirely different situation. Not long after its release, a disc of snippets surfaced that included exerpts of 21 tracks (I think it was) recorded during the same sessions but only half of them actually made the album. A complete version of "Long Wave" is long overdue since there are quite a few fun tracks amongst the unreleased ones, especially Jeff's take on "Saturday Night At the Duck Pond" that used to stream in full length on a Polish ELO fan website for a while but has since disappeared.
Not putting out the whole "Long Wave" sessions seems so much like a missed opportunity now. But I guess since Jeff is on a different label now, it might take a long time until an expanded reissue includes those other tracks. The best time for that would have been a year before the comeback album "Alone in the Universe" hit the shelves. That would have been a great build-up.

 

What turned me off most of AITU is the beef the character in most of the songs' lyrics must have had with a woman. "The Sun Will Shine On You" and "Blue" remain my favourite tracks from that record. AITU is no comparison to "Zoom" which I still love very much and which is probably my most played ELO album because of all of its great songs.

Those drums is what happens when artists do everything by themselves in their home studio in multitrack recording: the interplay that a group of musicians have is missing. That interplay is what makes a band playing everything live in a room to a 2-track recorder something special.

 

OK song that doesn't really take off. Sounds like a polished demo b side to me more than A list proper album material.

Sluggish repetitive drums, no real changes from verse to verse, extremely claustrophobic, overused descending chords throughout the song both verse and chorus.

It sounds like ELO--much moreso than, say, the material Zoom--but it doesn't sound like grade A ELO. In fact, it sounds a lot like what an ELO homage/mimic band might come up with.

I say this as someone who can find multiple transcendent songs on every ELO album up through Balance of Power and the first solo release.

 

Not much better than Bev?

In what universe is Jeff Lynne as good as Bev Bevan as a drummer? Bevan became increasingly unimportant to ELO as they matured into the '80s, but he's a very good drummer.

Jeff, at his very best, is arguably proficient enough to create a looped backing track.

Jeff has airbrushed out much of the ELO band over the years, and even he would not argue that he's as good a drummer as Bev.

 

Well put!

 

IMHO there is no comparing Jeff to Bev in the drums department. If Jeff was that good, he would have shown up in articles in drum magazines or would be cited by fellow drummers for his technique and feel. Neither of those has happened. Jeff is a timekeeper for his solo albums and that is the extent of it. Which is fine, because I don't consider him a drummer anyway.

 

Out of curiosity, I analyzed the track under a technical aspect, here is my result (in the German Rolling Stone Forum):
Rolling Stone Forum

tanslated by Google:

However you find the song, it is definitely produced very effectively - so with minimal effort
This can be easily validated by phase cancellation test *.

My result:

Recorded were a total of eight instrumental bars, the drums consists of a one-bar loop, the chorus has been sung once.
The 8bar pattern was copied identically 10 times in succession, the first and sixth pass are accompanied by the additional guitar track with the melody, the eighth through a few piano notes. The chorus of the refrain "let me go .." is the same take in all choruses, so the four choruses are also exactly the same in phase - completely generated by copy and paste.

This is certainly not unusual in the production of pop songs - more in line with the usual standard, at least in the daily business of mainstream pop.
However, I would have put ELO / Jeff Lynne in a production-related league. Sure, since Discovery there was also one or the other drumloop, but I did not expect such a consistent modular approach - especially not with the lead vocals.

So I'm a bit surprised that Jeff Lynne has not developed any more ambition to deliver a more authentic recording.
He himself keeps his demands on the production level very high in interviews.
Maybe that adds to the somewhat unloving, boring nature of the track, which has been criticized by some.
After the first 8 bars, you've already heard everything instrumentally, after the first chorus everything finally ...

Of course, an album with 10 tracks can be produced rather quickly, especially since not much time was needed for finding and working out the overall sound (drum sound, EQing, Mix, Mastering..etc ..). Templates are certainly available for this, so that probably only detail adjustments from track to track are necessary.



* (2 stereo tracks in any DAW (Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase ..), Tempo 100bpm, invert the phase on one of the two tracks - then cut the track exactly every 8 bars and superimpose the different parts randomly -> until on the vocals in the verses etc .. and a few little things almost everything deletes perfectly.
That sounds a bit technical - in a nutshell, this is a reliable test method to figure out if two audios are actually 100% identical)

 

While I very much appreciate the level of technical detail you've provided, I'm also more than a little worried that you'll end up attracting the same kind of attention I recently faced when suggesting fans do the same between different recordings on Jeff's live shows over the last few years to possibly highlight where elements were identical from one night to the next...

On the other hand, I noticed the use of repeated parts in his latest track, and it didn't bother me one bit. He probably felt the initial chorus take was perfect and didn't need to spend unnecessary time recording anything further - considering that much of this new album was likely recorded between touring commitments, I don't blame him for adopting this approach!

 

I'm crossing my fingers that next year Giles Martin will remix 'From Out Of Nowhere'.

It's never too early to start this kind of argument.

 

Don't forget The Who!

 

Listening now on Amazon HD...already liking it better than anything on AITU! Sounds very “Time”-inspired, but damn it’s too short!