Episode 213 - Time by Electric Light Orchestra

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Dads of the world, UNITE! How do you follow the Beach Boys? Well, apparently it’s by covering Electric Light Orchestra. Going from one grandad band to one dad band seems to make a crude kind of sense, even if immersing oneself in the music of ELO is…difficult.

Not because they’re terrible. No no no. They are by no means a terrible band. Some of their music has aged well whereas some of it certainly has not (we’re looking at you Discovery). One example of the former is their ridiculous foray into synth-pop with their ninth album, Time.

Chosen by guest Alexander Volz from the wonderful podcast Every Album Ever (which you should absolutely check out if you’re a fan of ours - they’ve covered a bunch of stuff we’ve covered, as well as some we want to cover in future), his rationale was pretty straight forward - it’s a very polarising album and it should fit in well with our MO.

And he’s right. Despite still selling millions of copies, the claim that Time is an unsung album is a very fair one. The mid 70s were the band’s creative and commercial high points - A New World Record (1976) and Out of the Blue (1977) were runaway successes for the band. After incorporating disco elements in 1979’s Discovery, and tackling their first film soundtrack with Xanadu in 1980, Jeff Lynne was trying to find ways to keep the band sounding relevant and with Time, he largely succeeded.

A concept album about a man being transported from 1981 to 2095, the album sees Lynne and co ditch the string quartet they had used for the last decade and replace it almost entirely with synthesisers. The result is much like The Visitors by ABBA, a record that is very ahead of its time and sees the band use new technology to evolve their sound. 

Sadly, the album seemed to mark the beginning of the end for ELO - after a poorly attended tour the band all but ceased playing live, and the follow up, 1983’s Secret Messages, essentially killed the band entirely. 1986’s Balance of Power was created and released as a way to fulfil contractual obligations and ELO simply vanished into the shadows. Aside from a brief re-emergence in 2001 to release the poorly received Zoom, Jeff Lynne kept ELO dormant until 2015.

In the period between Time and the present day the band never revisited this synth heavy sound. Which is a shame because you can hear lots of different genres of electronic music emerging from this one record. It’d have been cool to see what another album of this would have been like.

Is this an unsung classic? We certainly think so. What say you?

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