Electric Light Orchestra – Balance of Power Review

The glitz of popularity soon comes for us all. Electric Light Orchestra had been synth-styled masters of the craft before its popularity boom in the 1980s. Jeff Lynne had maintained a crucial balance between its excess and the rewarding merit of it in restraint with the likes of Time or Out of the Blue. But this is where the wheels come off. It happens to everyone. Nobody was safe from the grasp of the charts and their instrumental ways in this period. Not even Bob Dylan fought against it. Empire Burlesque remains one of the more jagged edges of his career and it is all because of the grim, aged style of the album, from artwork to attempted pop culture capture, all the way through to the fatigue of writing. He had hit a wall and so too had Lynne on Balance of Power.  

Though it is harsh to call Balance of Power a death knell, it did stump the original band until Zoom fifteen years later. Listen to those vocally manipulated horrors on Heaven Only Knows. E.L.O. is running on the high made by their own fumes. Following the heartfelt style of earnest messages and bold stretches in the face of tired sounds on Secret Messages, the Balance of Power slump is a sad affair. Flowery and particularly empty vocal ruminations on its opening track rely on a simpler rhyming structure and the new tech of pop music at the time. But the isolation heard in them should have been a sign. These are the last major contributions of Richard Tandy to E.L.O., and what a waste it is. Balance of Power is the first sign of Lynne as the one-man band which he would soon adapt in later releases, but this album is nothing more than a band running out of road.  

There are still fluid moments of interesting sound. So Serious is a neat piece, if over-reliant on the backing vocals and instrumental cohesion, tacky here, that worked so well in the past. Pieces like Secret Lives and Is It Alright feel like soulless combinations of what made E.L.O. so enjoyable, but without the heart which guided it. At its best, Balance of Power is a middle-of-the-road piece bogged down in the at-the-time stylish sound. It has since become this dated piece of dreck which fails to stand out. Not every album can be a world beater but the writing is on the wall for Balance of Power, a desperately tiresome piece with its 1980s flavour.  

Where E.L.O. were once boundary pushers, Balance of Power undoes the decade of good faith put into them by audiences. Lynne is on autopilot for this, with plenty of repetitive pieces, fade-outs and half-baked ideas for an album which stands as unremarkable at best. There is a new sound around, as Sorrow About to Fall reveals. It is no improvement on the work of E.L.O., nor an interesting move. A lazy piece of work from Lynne, a rarity in his gifted career but a dire collection of forgettable songs nonetheless. Poking through are the glitzy special effects, the empty saxophone solos and this vapid sense of the band losing the image of their success. A stark contrast to their earliest works, but what little there was to gain in chasing the charts is enough to sink the style of Lynne and the band.