electric light orchestra on the third day songs

#ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA ON THE THIRD DAY SONGS CODE#

It ends with a spastic explosion of violin sawing before shifting to the very similar “Oh No Not Susan”. “Bluebird Is Dead” begins as a fine Beatles pastiche, with Lennonesque vocals and melting “I Am the Walrus” cello touches, but has a synthesizer and guitar break in the middle that moves it beyond its apparent source of inspiration.

#ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA ON THE THIRD DAY SONGS CODE#

The suite opens plenty bombastically with “Ocean Breakup”, which features tense pizzicato strings melded with a telegraph bleating morse code, then shifts to a warbling synthesizer passage and back to morse code before settling into “King of the Universe”, a cozy mid-tempo track that finely balances strings with electronic effects and Lynne’s customarily drawn-out vocals - I must say, he sounds pretty lazy and laid-back for someone pronouncing himself king of the sky. Presumably that peculiar image tied in to the vague creation theme that unifies the songs on the first side, which marked one of Lynne’s early attempts at making a sidelong suite of interconnected tracks, à la side two of Abbey Road. Nevertheless it achieved modest success, particularly in the US, setting the stage for the band’s emergence in America.įollowing a successful American tour, ELO finished recording its third album, On the Third Day, which has now been reissued in America with bonus tracks (including demo versions of “Showdown” and “Ma-Ma-Ma Belle”, and outtake “Everyone’s Born to Die”, featuring Marc Bolan on guitar) and with the UK cover replacing the original American cover, a black-and-white photo of the band dressed ordinarily but exposing their navels. (Wizzard parodied the concept with its single “Bend Over Beethoven”, which also gives one a sense of the terms on which Wood departed). Even Lynne now admits this clumsy amalgam was “corny”. The single from ELO II, a ham-fisted version of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” augmented with themes from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, epitomizes the foibles of the classical music approach to rock. It took him some time to nail down what he wanted the band to sound like. Wood grew restless with the concept and left after the first album to form Wizzard (a band that sounds something like a rockabilly 10cc), leaving Lynne in creative control of the band. (It would hardly be the last time that Lynne would co-opt the Beatles’ sound the word Beatlesque may well have been coined to pigeonhole Lynne’s songwriting strategies.) A success in England, the single would turn out to be the pinnacle for the original ELO configuration. Of course, the Beatles had experimented with orchestration as well, and the first ELO single, “10538 Overture”, with its extended “Frère Jacques” string outro, sounds a lot like something from Magical Mystery Tour. (ELO would be sort of a reverse image of Blood, Sweat and Tears: the original BS&T added horns to blues-based songs ELO would add strings to pop). The new band name would reinforce the idea of this equal partnership. But Wood and Lynne wanted to take the next step and incorporate an actual string section and feature it equally with the rock instrumentation rather than use it merely for fills and accents. Though known for helping define the propulsive style now called freakbeat, the Move had also toyed with baroque pop on such songs as “Blackberry Way” and “Something”, and had scored a hit with “Night of Fear”, which borrows directly from Tchaikovsky’s “1058 Overture”. It wasn’t as though ELO was setting out for entirely new territory.

But when it doesn’t, it’s indulgent schlock (think Rick Wakeman), or worse, well-wrought but emotionally vacant showpieces that typify the soulless product of corporate rock. When this strategy works, it makes for a brilliant, intuitive synthesis - and the immediately familiar hits from ELO’s juggernaut years in the mid-’70s bear this out. But what this all amounted to in practice was condensing such ideas as orchestrated rock riffs played on violas and song snippets sewn into extensive suites and presenting them as big, unsubtle hooks. The band’s intention of incorporating ideas from classical music seemed a bit grandiose and hubristic, as well (“my tunes are just like Bach’s!”). The band was a proven hit-maker in England (though mysteriously not in America, despite being the equal of any other British Invasion band), and the record company was perhaps puzzled that the same band members should want to toss away the established name for one rather unwieldy and pretentious. ELO was formed in 1972 when the remaining members of the Move - multi-instrumentalist and songwriting genius Roy Wood, drummer Bev Bevan and late arrival Jeff Lynne, who had originally made his name with another English group from Birmingham, the Idle Race - were ready to move on, as it were, to better explore the proggish ideas that were already surfacing on such albums as Shazam! and Looking On.

Electric light orchestra on the third day songs