Review Summary: Out of the Blue? No, into the blah.
Arena rock and big production had defined much of the music scene of the mid- to late 1970s. But by the beginning of the 1980s, disco's rather ugly death and the emergence of new wave signaled that top-tier stadium acts such as the Electric Light Orchestra were being relegated to yesterday's news.
ELO bandleader Jeff Lynne initially attempted to adjust to that seismic shift in popular music by sporting a shorter haircut and some riffs that were quite likely inspired by new wave acts such as The Buggles when he crafted the 1981
Time concept album. But the 1983 follow-up record
Secret Messages eschewed all new wave pretensions, attempting instead to turn back the clock to pick up where ELO's 1977 smash hit
Out of the Blue had left off. Yet rather than allowing the band to revisit its glory days,
Secret Messages would serve as a sort of a last gasp for an idea that had passed its prime.
There is a brief moment during the opening notes of the album that almost sounds like Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine", but any hopes of an homage to Syd Barrett are soon dashed as the title track settles into the now-customary big too-steady redundant ELO beat. The band then goes on to rehash its usual motifs, including Velveeta pop ("Loser Gone Wild"), the obligatory homogenized tribute to fifties rock (the painful "Rock and Roll is King"), a sort-of "Don't Bring Me Down"/ Dave Edmunds hybrid ("Four Little Diamonds") and a soppy although acceptable ballad ("Take Me On and On").
At the bottom of the barrel is "Letter from Spain," which has the feel of a third-rate Enya cover heard while receiving a root canal
sans anesthesia. (The song was released several years before Enya's debut; you can decide for yourself whether that makes this track innovative or something else.) The best thing here is "Stranger", which almost sounds like something that Al Stewart may have done had he used ELO string arrangements. (Then again, it's not entirely clear that the world needed to revisit "Year of the Cat" and "Time Passages.") On the whole, not a particularly inspired collection.
Secret Messages was planned as a double album ala
Out of the Blue,. But the record label took a machete to that idea, reducing the original eighteen-track collection to a single LP with ten tracks.
Just as movie fans seek out the director's cuts of films, ELO aficionados may be hopeful that Lynne's "authentic" lengthier version of
Secret Messages is superior to the original album. Over the last few decades, all but one of those deleted songs have since been released elsewhere, so it is now possible to almost recreate the album as it was originally intended. I've done this for you so that you won't have to, and trust me, you won't have to.
Seven of the eight songs that were missing from the original single LP release are now available, some in the form of bonus tracks on later CD reissues of the album and others on the multi-disc
Afterglow anthology compilation. Of these tunes, the only one that merits any special attention is "Hello My Old Friend" if only because of how utterly disappointing it is. The best moments of Jeff Lynne's career have come from repackaging Beatles licks into new songs that are familiar yet unique, but "Hello My Old Friend" is a dismal take on "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane." Clocking in at almost eight minutes, Lynne's tribute to his industrial hometown of Birmingham (a place that he adores so much that he abandoned it during the mid-1970s for LA not long after the money started rolling in) is about nine minutes too long.
There is an even worse Beatlesque failure in the form of the one song that has never been officially released, the excruciating "Beatles Forever." This fawning tribute to the Fab Four is heartfelt but so painfully earnest and sickeningly sweet ("There's something about a Beatles song, that lives forevermore... They really taught the world to sing") that listening to it makes your ears hurt as your teeth would after eating a bagful of sugar. Even Lynne must realize now how cringeworthy this one must be, as the only way to hear it is by locating a murky bootleg recording.
Out of the Blue had no shortage of cheese, but it was still an effective package that included songs that worked well together and was anchored by one of best singles of the 1970s, the brilliant "Mr. Blue Sky". Although
Secret Messages contains aspects of some of the same elements of that earlier album, the overall result never quite works, with the best songs on the record being only on par with the filler found on
Out of the Blue. Rather than improving it, the double album version of
Secret Messages only doubles down on the schmaltz.
At this point, Jeff Lynne should have discovered the joys of golf or some other hobby that would have distracted him from any further songwriting. (An annual ELO farewell tour would have been preferable.) Instead, he would go on from here to make the worst album of his career and perhaps one of the worst albums ever made by a major rock act,
Balance of Power.
Author's note/ shameless plug: This is one part of my ongoing series of reviews of most of ELO's original studio releases. If you found this commentary to be somewhat informative, interesting, intriguing, intelligent, indefensible, insufferable, infuriating, incoherent, inane, incomprehensible or insulting, or if you just want to take pity on a guy who is masochistic enough to write these things, then please take a look at the other reviews and add your own thoughts. Thanks.
