Compilation efforts for the passing listener should be simple. Collect the songs of interest from an artist and offer them in a smart package. Preferably, when the listener is either tired of the songwriter’s current outputs or the musician has retired. Either will work, though Electric Light Orchestra’s discography is hardly filled with surprises. It is up to the compiler, then, to create surprises of their own. Definitive Collection may be a compilation of the Jeff Lynne-featuring band’s works, but it is far from an everyday compilation. It is much stranger than that. Not worse, nor better, than the studio albums or other track selections around, just a definitively peculiar release. Little fade-ins and overlaps, which are neither for quality-of-life purposes nor improving the sound. What, then, is the reason to take out the tuning radio of Mr. Blue Sky and fade in a song from Twilight elsewhere? Collage occasions.
That’s all it is. Definitive Collection wishes to represent the collage on the cover. Lynne, who on the cover of Definitive Collection looks like a daytime talk show host who has a self-help book to peddle, is out of place amid the Monty Python-like scattering of imagery. But it’s a fitting one for the times. It counters the sharpness of Cool Britannia and looks like it should be bundled into a magazine offer. Sounds it, too. Credits which do not quite match the songs, fade-ins and outs of other pieces which do not feature on the album, it’s a bit of an artisanal affair Definitive Collection. There comes a time in the discography of any band with longevity on their side where a straightforward compilation is not enough. Not for the listener, not for the band, not even those tasked with shuffling the approved hits in a different order. Definitive Collection is ambitious for no good reason. It’s a puzzling one.
Whoever was behind this ELO compilation found it appropriate to tuck Above the Clouds in after Livin’ Thing as some strange Easter egg. They’re forgiven, for their decision to include a few Secret Messages songs does overhaul the compilation. Inevitabilities from Out of the Blue, Time, and Discovery are well-placed too. Nothing out of the ordinary there, bar a few minor changes which are more for some niche Mandela effect moment, imagining notes from nowhere in songs ever-so-slightly changed here. It’s bizarre but, in this haze of fear and fatigue, quite fun to revisit. It doesn’t try too hard to overhaul the songs, and at least the fades, phases, and overlaps of each song appreciate the collage on the front cover. It’s a stretch better than most of the recent compilation efforts, which have done away with the Spaceship and children’s channel host-looking Lynne for stock text and nothing more.
Definitive Collection comes from a time when real effort went into even the most asinine of projects. Another collection of ELO’s songs, a decade on from their first break-up. It must be made of materials destined for landfills, because the album itself is headed there all the same. From shelf to some pit in the desert. Definitive Collection is, even with its few light charms, a copy of all those other compilations. They are not the way to listen to works from an artist, not then, and especially not now when you can piece together a compilation of your own via a playlist. Definitive Collection throws out twenty-seven songs and it’s your usual fittings and fixtures from the ELO discography, and that Chuck Berry cover, of course. Poor Boy (The Greenwood) getting a look-in is about as interesting as it gets on this one.
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