ELO 2 [AKA: ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA II‎]

Roy Wood left ELO half-way through recording this album, after playing bass on two key tracks, and with that the Jeff Lynne-led ELO was born. This album is a transition between the sound of the first album, with its angular sawing string arrangements played by Wood and a clearly non-commerical outlook, and the smooth commercial strings-based rock that Lynne would take ELO into on subsequent albums. The prime track here, and one of the best ELO songs ever, is "From the Sun to the World", which Wood plays on (but Lynne wrote - Lynne wrote all the music on this album). 'Sun' is a very inventive and musical progressive rock song. "Kuiama" and "In Old England Town" are also good progressive tracks, although I find Lynne's vocal on the latter a bit too rough at times. "Mama" is a classic Lynne ballad, similar to what would come later (like "Can't Get It Out of My Head" etc), but Mama is among the better of these. And ELO's rockin' version of "Roll Over Beethoven" (with the strings combining sections from the 5th symphony with a bunch of new instrumental pars) is a great guilty pleasure. After you get the debut ELO album, I would recommend this one. After this, the music would get very commercial and syrup-y (albeit at times quality syrup), but on this album the band is quite original, musical and innovative, and at time raw. I give this 7.7 out of 10 on my 10-point scale, which is at the very high end of 3 PA stars.

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