Four attempts at recapturing the magic Jeff Lynne made with Electric Light Orchestra, and each one missed the main point. Lynne. Only he can make ELO work and those offshoots following the band’s breakup in 1986 are telling. The Orchestra marks the last attempt, thankfully. No Rewind was released the same year as Zoom and the similarities are staggering. But again, what they miss out on here is the Lynne factor – the almost constant, slow-burning whimsy which affects his songs and their larger-than-life style. Immediately the problems reveal themselves. No Rewind expects a literal orchestra to win us over. All they need is an actual electric light show and only then will they distract from this horrid pastiche of the popular, initial ELO period of Out of the Blue. Lynne may have found himself compared to The Beatles in his heyday, but The Orchestra sounds like The Bootleg Beatles with a few missing strings.
Catchy, certainly. So is chickenpox. No Rewind is itching to pick up where Lynne left off. Trying to head right back into the nostalgic heart of the band was not working for the Lynne-led lineup, let alone a band that use an orchestral addition to battle an overzealous percussionist, who seems to be tone-deaf on opener Jewel & Johnny. It serves as an amalgamation of everything people think they enjoy about ELO. A guitar solo here, plucked and rising strings there, all the while radio chatter appears. Heartless stuff. Follow-up Say Goodbye sounds a tad too similar to the hits ELO put out. Granted, the point of this Eric Troyer-led, Kelly Groucutt-featuring collective is to emulate ELO, but is there no shame? Hollow track after hollow track. There is nothing humble about chasing the creations of another artist and The Orchestra comes across as nothing but jealous figures from the past trying to make a go on the financial rigidity of a recognisable musical outfit.
They want their cut and the way to get it is to make a project feel like an ELO record, to give it the dress-up. No amount of makeup can disguise the songwriting though, poor the whole way through. Melodramatic nonsense made in the shadow of better works. Still time for an atrocious cover of The Beatles’ Twist & Shout, too. The Orchestra is out of options. They succumb to the will of those listeners who found themselves tying Lynne and the original group to the Fab Four. Lean into it. Why not? Bev Bevan tries to wheedle his way in with Over London Skies, a placid and rotten love lost song where the backdrop of an airport does all the heavy lifting for his poor metaphors.
Credit where it is due as The Orchestra is not just destined to toil away in the shadow of Lynne but boyband groups of the time. Tepid Take That-like waters are hit upon with If Only, the hammy love angles found within are a desperate, misery-induced attempt at being heartfelt. There is nothing further from it. Just awful. The whole way through. No Rewind stinks of something particularly foul. Covering The Beatles, clawing at what little Bevan and the jilted members of ELO can provide in the Lynne-shaped hole. It would be more ethical to release an album of radio static. No Rewind is never going to be rewound. Only a maniac, jumped up on nostalgia and blinded by the hopes of an improved listening experience, would ever return to this disgrace.
What a load of rubbish!