Electric Light Orchestra
A New World Record

THE REVIEW

After the great success achieved with the LP "Face The Music," the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO for friends and for us from now on) does not take a single moment of rest, unveiling yet another successful album: "A New World Record."

This time too, good old Jeff Lynne decides to follow the path of symphonic rock-pop, while still nodding to 50s rockabilly, melodrama, and even operetta. Although we are faced with a multifaceted album, and thus more varied than its predecessor, the listener unfortunately finds themselves with a work less inspired and engaging than the band's average, with an ever clearer shift towards pop rock; if in Face The Music we had some pale traces of the band's progressive past, in this work these remnants have completely vanished.

In full ELO-style, the songs are all quite catchy, the problem remains the same: Jeff and the team dare little, producing from this album onwards, the usual stuff. Despite the intro à la Eldorado (probably their most successful work) present in "Tightrope," we find the usual little songs, including Telephone Line, a kind of surrogate of Waterfall from the previous album, Mission (A World Record), a load of honeyed notes, Livin’ Thing, the usual chart-topping single without infamy and without praise, and decidedly livelier songs like So Fine, the rocking, but annoyingly redundant, Do Ya, and the very good Rockaria!, which begins with a lyrical chant, then erupts into a frenzied piece in full rockabilly style, becoming one of the band's most famous pieces. Skipping the unnecessary Above The Clouds we reach the finish line, the album is practically over, and we are faced with a product well below expectations… but just when you thought this album would plunge into the abyss of mediocrity, there is a rescue, in soccer terms, in the Cesarini zone.

Shangri-La, Jeff's new Eldorado.

If in Eldorado there is a deliberate move away from one's fantasies, in Shangri-La, an imaginary place created by the visionary pen of James Hilton, which represents happiness and tranquility, there is the loss of a paradise of which we do not know if it is a real loss experienced, or if it's yet another fantasy, demolished by stark reality (this, of course, always within the context of the song itself). In any case, Jeff shows us real flashes of genius: the music has a vague oriental sound, relaxing, while the lyrics are markedly melancholic from the start; Jeff himself compares the departure from his Shangri-La to the "fade-out" of the Beatles in Hey Jude, and those who had the good idea to listen to the song carefully (but especially, in stereo mode with a nice pair of headphones), from the second chorus onwards, the sound of the so-called "right side" begins to blur more and more, expressing in an almost "physical" sense, at a musical level, the departure from Shangri-La… a true stroke of genius. Just when the song seems to reach a tired conclusion, here's the unexpected coup de grâce; the atmosphere completely changes and the listener is transported to the final two minutes, which vaguely recall the motif heard at the beginning of the album, with a dramatically heightened drama, with Jeff's desperate singing that, between the heart-wrenching and the lyrical, sings us the following verse:

“I will return… to Shangri-La”

Hope is choked by despair, slowly leading us to the end of an album saved from mediocrity precisely by the final song, with the unexpected final twist.