Jeff Lynne’s ELO – Alone In The Universe (2015)

Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra is back with a new album — “Alone In The Universe“, announced for November 13, and marks Lynne’s first studio outing under the ELO banner since 2001’s Zoom.
“Alone In The Universe” is an appropriately title because, notwithstanding the ELO moniker glowing promisingly at the top of the front cover, this time Lynne really is on his own.
Lynne wrote, produced and arranged every note at home in Los Angeles, and handled all vocal and instrumental duties (guitar, bass, drums, piano, synths, cello) with the exception of shaker and tambourine, which are played by his engineer, and backing vocals on a couple of tracks from his daughter.

Jeff Lynne has been away for a while with ELO, working as a producer for others and doing small solo projects since ELO initially disbanded in 1986.
True to aging-rocker form, he begins the first new ELO album (this reboot is actually credited to “Jeff Lynne’s ELO”) in nearly 15 years with a stately processional called “When I Was A Boy,” in which he confesses that ‘radio waves kept me company” and recalls that growing up, the only thing he wanted to do was make music.
Predictable in its nostalgia, the tune looks back at Lynne’s modest beginnings in Birmingham, England, and uses earnest language to celebrate music as a redemptive, life-changing force.
But here’s the plot twist: It’s not your typical muttering about long-gone glory days. Like much of “Alone In The Universe”, this song is the rousing, strong, surefooted work of a master who somehow remains in command of the kinetic Rock&pop hook — and everything that surrounds it.

That’s one delight of “Alone In The Universe”: in track after tightly disciplined track, it shows Lynne doing precisely what’s needed to convey the big idea behind the song, and no more. He plays most of the instruments here, and everything is executed with taste and restraint.
Though there are still plenty of thick string parts and intricate, wonderfully tense vocal-harmony arrays, it sounds like he’s aiming for a markedly less flashy, less glossy sound than that of ELO’s mid-’70s hit records. That’s probably because the songs he’s written are themselves less flashy.
Even a pure Rock&pop confection like “Dirty To The Bone” (akin ELO’s classic Evil Woman) exhibits an earthiness from a mature artist.

Lynne’s sense of aptness is perhaps most evident in the guitar breaks. He’s not a hotshot, and perhaps as a result has never been fully appreciated for his guitar work. But both his rhythm textures and his leads here are stunning.
The brief instrumental rejoinders of “Love And Rain” tease out and then deepen the blues implications embedded in the vocal theme, while his short 16-measure excursion in “One Step At A Time” offers a complete master class on how to use neon-hot guitar tone rather than technique to create a captivating solo.

Most of the songs on the album last between three and four minutes; Lynne stops at the exact moment when another iteration of the chorus would turn a blissful moment tedious. That’s another often-overlooked aspect of Rock&pop production: knowing when to disappear.
Lynne has a keen sense of this, and in most cases he opts for short and sweet, emphasizing the elusive here-then-gone quality that marks the hits of his youth. It’s one thing to write about the magic energy of music discovery as he does in “When I Was A Boy.”
It’s arguably a more significant accomplishment to conjure that giddy and addictive feeling out of thin air, as a sixty-something veteran, using a strange alchemy of melody, harmony and rhythm.
“Alone In The Universe” is a triumph of song-craft and studio invention, one that trounces notions of soft rock and progressive rock&pop. He might be a man alone now, but he’s got the whole world, potentially, in his hands. Again.

01. When I Was a Boy
02. Love and Rain
03. Dirty to the Bone
04. When the Night Comes
05. The Sun Will Shine on You
06. Ain’t It a Drag
07. All My Life
08. I’m Leaving You
09. One Step at a Time
10. Alone in the Universe

PRE-ORDER:
www.amazon.co.uk/69/dp/B015RND9H0
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