THE HARD STUFF ALBUMS
Jeff Lynne’s ELO
From Out Of Nowhere SONY
Mostly a sparkling continuation of Jeff Lynne’s return to form.
Only the second album from ELO in two decades (third in more than 30 years), and right from the opening notes of starter From Out Of Nowhere it’s like Jeff Lynne has never been away. The wistfulness, the super-saturated sound, the layered harmonies and instrumentation, the timeless echo of pasts and retro-futures colliding. The humanity, the performed frailty at the heart of manufactured perfection. Lynne still has it. He still knows how to create the magic.
Of course, there’s a spaceship on the sleeve, motionless in the night sky.
Like 2015’s Alone In The Universe, Lynne plays almost every note on the album – guitars, bass, piano, drums, keyboards. He sings all the lead vocals and harmonies. He produces (of course). The only other musicians who play on it are engineer Steve Jay, who adds a little percussion, and ELO keyboard player Richard Tandy, who plays a piano solo on One More Time.
Perhaps some tracks are a little throwaway – the string-driven , the cleaned-up 50s. That’s okay, though. That was always part of the appeal of ELO back in their glory days. (You could argue the late 2010s are another period of ELO’s glory days, so triumphant has been Lynne’s return to touring.)
