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Electric Light Orchestra - Face the Music

When I was ten years old I remember hearing "Roll Over Beethoven" and it melted my little brain. This wasn't like anything I'd heard. 1973 was an awesome year for formative rock and roll, and I'd file away names like BTO, Rick Derringer, Ian Thomas, and Alice Cooper and when I got older I would buy their albums. So where was ELO on this future list of must have bands? Not near the top, and as time passed my interest waned. Heck it was a close thing when "Don't Bring Me Down" and "My Sharona" were vying for the world's most overplayed song, but I managed to NOT get either album. Then in 1980 the band tried to do their own version of The Wiz by releasing the soundtrack to Xanadu and I wrote them off - this was not rock and roll.

Then the year I graduated the band dropped Time, and for whatever reason this weird, electronic, cheesy release resonated with me and I played the album until I was pretty sure I could hear bleed over from the other side of the record. You'd have thought being so enamoured I'd have stayed on the wagon, but really after Secret Messages I sort of lost track for a long time.

Over the years I'd pick up a lot of stuff on CD, and even find a collection of their early stuff with the ever inimitable Roy Wood (Roy @#$! Wood!). So it was a weird surprise to hear a piece of music on the classic rock station I'd never heard before that blew my mind. Most of the time this particular station is really bad at giving details about what they're playing. To my surprise I caught the title "Fire on High" but not the band. As fate would have it about a week later around the same time it comes on again (who says rock radio isn't formulaic?) and this time I catch the name. ELO, ah, I thought it was ELP and Greg Lake was rocking the guitar. Nope. Jeff Lynne.

I searched my library for the song, and I didn't have it. Which I kind of figured as I don't think I'd have forgotten a song that great. I did look up the album and it was one right between two I did have, Eldorado and New World Record. Go figure.

Then a couple of days later when I was bin diving at the record store, there is was, just waiting for me. I have no idea why it was in the bin - maybe a misfile? The jacket was in decent shape, the insert was there and the vinyl was pretty clean even before getting a bath and vacuum.

The first thing I noticed right away was "Fire on High" was longer and more weirder (yes, more weirder) at the start than the radio edit I'd heard. Not bad weird, good weird. At this stage in their career ELO was still heavy on strings and orchestration, with the violin and cello players listed as members of the band, but the sound was clearly moving into their pop phase as evidenced by their hits "Evil Woman" and "Strange Magic" which still sounds crisp and sharp. Heck the whole album is great. I have a hard time processing this as an album that came out in 1975, I'm not sure where 12 year old me would put this in the pecking order, but grown ass old me loves it.

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