Out of the Blue

Queen and ELO in the same week? Tempted to buy some supermarket stone washed jeans, a brown leather jacket and a copy of The Times then go to the pub for a pint of mild and a right good chat on what's wrong with the modern world.

There’s a couple of stand out songs on this album. But like most double albums it’s entirely too long. Way way too long. Probably a 3.5 but I’m rounding down because with some editing this could’ve been a high 4 star album.

A lot to like here, can’t help but enjoy some of these songs. Sweet Talkin’ Woman is an enjoyable number. Album far too long though and a few songs that don’t hit the mark but still a pleasant listen.

I only remember this band from Don't Bring me Down, and the giant UFO stage show photos that awed every kid in 1979. WAY more Beatles-esque than I remember. Sounds like a lot of Bowie influence in there too. Overall, I don't dislike it, but the whole "let's add orchestral instruments to rock" just doesn't get me going.

I've heard singles from the Electric Light Orchestra, a progressive pop-rock outfit, here and there and generally enjoyed them, including three singles from this album, Out of the Blue. I likewise enjoyed the album overall, but there is a threshold to that sentiment.

Let's make this clear—this is a double album that clocks in at 70 minutes, and the length was certainly felt by the time I got to side four. I remember getting the most kicks out of side three referred to as Concerto for a Rainy Day, where all the tracks were weather-related and culminated in "Mr. Blue Sky" which has become the most well-known hit. At that point, I would have figured closing out on that track would have been genius, but the album kept going and ending on the slightly inferior "Wild West Hero".

To be fair, there's not a bad track throughout, and I certainly don't mind the well-apparent Beatles influence on this album. It's clear from Jeff Lynne's vocals and songwriting that he wanted to continue down the experimental pop rabbit hole that the Beatles went through a decade prior. But I can't deny that this album would have done better in under an hour.

I still enjoyed Out of the Blue and am glad it's included here. I'd recommend splitting your listening experience into two halves for this one.

MR. BLUE SKY!!!!!

Quite enjoyable, but dweeby as fuck. Surely ELO were never cool? Mad to think what happened to the cellist. If you don’t know, watch ‘Upright’ with Tim Minchin. Great series!

Some okay album cuts on here, but mostly I’m realizing why the songs that made it to the greatest hits were Turn to Stone and Mr Blue Sky. The rest of the songs range from tolerable to exhausting. It’s not that there’s anything necessarily bad on here, just a lot of filler. Okay wow, I just looked and this is their seventh album. No wonder there’s so much filler. Crazy that their biggest hit was on here though.

I TURN TO STONE
WHEN YOU ARE GONE
I TURN TO STONE

Una de las mejores piezas de Pop que he oído. Me pone feliz, a bailar, a imaginar planetas lejanos. Un disco eclipsado por sus varios éxitos en él, sí, pero qué éxitos. Y las canciones menos conocidas también tienen muchísimo mérito. Me ha costado decidirme, pero como esto es mi lista y hago lo que quiero con ella creo que ELO se lleva unas merecidísimas 5 estrellas.

That’s obviously a 5.

This is my first time listening to this album in full – obviously, I know Mr. Blue Sky, but that’s about it, really. My experience with ELO as a whole is super minimal – maybe an occasional thing heard on the radio, but the big thing, other than Mr. Blue Sky, is reading once that John Lennon reportedly said the Beatles, had they stayed together, would’ve likely sounded like ELO.

That sentiment rings pretty damn true here: this feels like a Beatles album, in a very good way. Perhaps there’s a bit more bombast and synth, but in terms of the overall compositions, vocal styles, and just the underlining intangibles… yeah, this feels like where they all could’ve gone.

Admittedly, I’m not quite sure how to describe my overall thoughts here – I think this is just fantastic across the board, from top to bottom, but I wonder how much of it is simply a factor getting really into the zone with this general style. This clicked extremely well with me; just about everything I like in this album can be traced back to every style present in the genre around this time. There’s some jukebox U.S. rock influence ala Boston or Kansas, there’s obviously the Beatles, there’s occasionally a dip into some Zeppelin/Stones style stuff, the piano feels sort of Elton John-esque at times, and the synth/vocoder work blends in part of what was making disco, pop, and R&B work incredibly well at the time. I do wish there were a few more chances to have me, as the listener, breathe a bit within the songs themselves, as some of these go at a breakneck speed without much of a pause, but I kinda love the rollercoaster feel. It’s an album that feels tailor-made to me, which makes it all the more baffling that I’ve never really interacted with it until now.

It also makes it sort of baffling that, once the experience of the album wore off, it almost felt like the cracks started to pop up, oddly enough. Again, this is a great album, it’s easily deserving of a 5, and I loved everything here, but… I couldn’t help but get a lingering sense that maybe, just maybe, the album’s bombast overstays its welcome and creates just a bit of a homogeneity that stops some of the tracks at an individual level from feeling as memorable. That is to say, I kind of found it hard to remember why I was super into stuff like Turn to Stone, Sweet Talkin’ Woman, Across the Border, Night in the City, etc – those feel incredible in the moment, and they work cohesively and brilliantly within the album, but until I went back to listen to them again, I couldn’t really place why I had liked them after I was done listening to the album. Perhaps it’s just a “first time listening” thing.

Ultimately, though, this is just too damn good to let little cracks or perceived imperfections get in the way of what this is, at its core: 70 minutes of blistering rock, that maybe sometimes goes a little too fast for its own good, but it more than makes up for it with the orchestral instrumentation, the huge variety of influences, and a very distinct style that clicks extremely well with my tastes. Someone else can write about the nitty gritty of the compositions and really break down why this has all those intangibles that just work, but for my ears, good music is good music, and this is fantastic music. It’s an absolute highlight of the 1970s, and a crime that I haven’t heard it until now. Very, very easy 5.

No need for a double album here, it's so long that I started to go delusional, and I misread the subtitle of side 3 as "Cornetto for a Rainy Day", which may be my new favourite phrase!

Voilà. C’est fait. J’ai survécu. Je viens de m’infliger les 70 minutes et 22 secondes de "Out of the Blue" d’Electric Light Orchestra. Soixante-dix putains de minutes. Je pourrais presque ajouter ça sur mon CV, juste en dessous de « Vendeur de disques pendant la guerre Blur vs Oasis » et « Animateur radio pendant l’invasion de la Macarena ». Ça pose un homme, une telle épreuve.

Quand j’ai vu ce double album arriver dans la liste, j’ai senti une vieille angoisse remonter. Pas la bonne, celle qui te prend aux tripes avant un concert des Stooges. Non, plutôt celle du dimanche soir, quand tu sais que le lendemain, il y a interro de maths et que t’as rien révisé. ELO, pour moi, c’est le son de l’ennui poli, la bande-son officielle des salles d’attente et des après-midis chez des amis de tes parents qui ont une collection de cactus et des murs couleur saumon.

Alors, c’est avec un courage que je qualifierais de surhumain que j’ai posé ce disque sur la platine (métaphoriquement, bien sûr, on est en 2025, merde). Et là, le drame. Le drame attendu, mais le drame quand même.

On va aller droit au but, parce que contrairement à Jeff Lynne, je n’ai pas l’intention de vous faire perdre votre temps. "Out of the Blue" n’est rien de plus, rien de moins, que la plus gigantesque, la plus boursouflée, la plus prétentieuse contrefaçon des Beatles jamais produite.

Je pèse mes mots. Ce n’est pas un hommage, c’est une OPA hostile sur l’héritage des Fab Four. Tout y est, mais en version Wish. Les enchaînements harmoniques de McCartney ? Copiés. Les envolées mélodiques de Lennon ? Pompées. Les arrangements orchestraux de George Martin ? Imbibés de sirop pour la toux et recrachés avec la subtilité d’un éléphant dans un magasin de porcelaine. Et cette voix… cette voix de Jeff Lynne qui s’évertue à sonner comme un mélange de Paul et John, mais qui finit par n’évoquer qu’un clone sous anxiolytiques.

C’est un rock tellement orchestral qu’il en oublie d’être du rock. Les violons dégoulinent, les synthés pépient comme des oisillons sous ecstasy et le vocodeur, mon Dieu, le vocodeur… À l’époque, ça devait sonner « futuriste ». Aujourd’hui, ça sonne comme un GPS qui aurait pris un mauvais acide. C’est la technologie comme cache-misère, un gadget pour masquer le vide intersidéral qui habite ces compositions.

Le pire, c’est que c’est un double album. Pourquoi ? Quelle était l’urgence ? Le côté « concept », la fameuse suite « Concerto for a Rainy Day » ? Laissez-moi rire. Un concerto pour un jour de pluie, c’est exactement ça : long, gris, et tu attends juste que ça se termine pour aller prendre l’air. On est face à un album qui est non seulement mou, mais qui s’étire, qui se vautre dans sa propre mollesse avec une complaisance qui force le respect.

Chaque morceau semble durer une éternité. Les intros s’allongent, les ponts n’en finissent plus, les codas sont à rallonge. C’est pompeux, c’est grandiloquent. C’est l’équivalent musical d’un discours de politicien : ça brasse beaucoup d’air, ça utilise des grands mots, mais au final, il ne reste rien. Même le fameux vaisseau spatial sur la pochette (qui a dû coûter un bras, d’ailleurs) a l’air de vouloir fuir la musique qu’il est censé illustrer.

Je veux bien admettre que c’est techniquement irréprochable. La production est tellement léchée qu’on pourrait manger dessus. C’est propre, c’est lisse, c’est nickel. Tellement nickel que c’en est stérile. Il n’y a aucune aspérité, aucune faille, aucune humanité. C’est du Formica sonore. Une musique de designer pour des intérieurs sans âme.

Alors, pourquoi diable ce truc est-il dans le livre des « 1001 albums que vous devez écouter avant de mourir » ? Pour les chiffres de vente, sans doute. Pour son succès à l’époque. Mais depuis quand le succès commercial est-il un gage de qualité artistique ? On a bien vendu des millions de disques de La Compagnie Créole, ça n’en fait pas pour autant des oeuvres impérissables.

L’écoute fut difficile, et le verdict est sans appel. Cet album est un monument de prétention, un colosse aux pieds d’argile synthétique. Il ne raconte rien, ne procure aucune émotion brute. C’est une symphonie du vide, un space opera pour comptables. La note de 1 sur 5 est presque charitable.

À éviter, sauf si vous avez une armoire à caler ou besoin d’un frisbee de luxe. Passez votre chemin, il y a mille autres disques qui méritent vraiment votre temps. Celui-ci, vous pouvez mourir tranquille sans l’avoir écouté. Croyez-moi, vous ne manquerez rien

Disco with classical instruments? You son of a beautiful woman, I'm in!

achei que ia ser rock progressivo bem doloroso de ouvir. eu estava completamente errado (ô glória).
bão demais esse aqui, eu to muito surpreso papo reto

I do not know if this is considered "yacht rock," because I'm not entirely sure what "yacht rock" actually is. But whatever this is, it *should* be considered yacht rock. Or the precursor to. It's really annoying and I don't like it at all. I'm only on the second song, so I don't yet want to doom it to a 1 star review, but I just looked and it has 17 songs and lasts for 1 hour and 11 minutes and I'm telling you now that is TOO MANY SONGS.

I feel llke must have heard this album a lot when I was a kid because my older brother had a copy and I heard all his listening choices by proxy. So, I was expecting at least a fun nostalgia hit but to be honest I only remembered the three big singles and the rest was a cheesy bland mush.

Pretty Beatles-y. Pretty good.

This is a good album, but it's really held up by Turn to Stone and Mr. Blue Sky. I also like the song Believe Me Now, though it's too short. Most other songs are meh or uninteresting, though Jungle is just plain bad. 2.5/5 -> 3/5.

ELO is one of those bands where the singles are a great time, but the full albums leave me wanting.

This double record get same-y very quickly. Mr. Blue Sky is rocks.

God, I want to like this *so much more than I do*. I like Jeff Lynne, or at least I think I do. I think his three-album run as producer of Cloud Nine, Traveling Wilburys Vol. One, and Full Moon Fever in the late 80's can be stacked up against any three-album run by any producer. But...I don't know. Everything here is *so* clean and *so* sheen that I just don't really connect with it. And it's always so, so much. Chill on the vocoder and the strings. Yes, I KNOW that's your thing and why so many people love this, but not me. It's not bad, and there are songs I dig (especially "Jungle" and "Mr. Blue Sky"), but it's not anywhere near the top of my list.

3/5