Electric Light Orchestra – Early ELO Review

At least the discographies of Neil Young and Bob Dylan are extensive enough to warrant frequently dipping into their early years. Though the latter may find his first album stretched beyond thin with a series of lacklustre YouTube playlists on the official channel, at least they weren’t printed on vinyl. Electric Light Orchestra fans will be hard-pressed to find solid roundups of the band’s work, unless they turn to bootleg offerings. It’ll be the best offering outside of just compiling your favourite songs into a playlist or listening to the album in full like a normal person. But in those pre-streaming, post-break-up days of the Jeff Lynne-fronted band is a desire to hear the earliest works. A compilation of those first three albums is what you get here, and that much isn’t worth revisiting. Not as a new release, anyway. The trio of albums in full range from serviceable to the first signs of life in an easy-listening powerhouse. Early ELO loses sight of that.  

A compilation which features just about every song of note from the band’s first three albums, and yet feels incomplete anyway. There’s no real excuse for not offering listeners those deeper cuts. Early ELO tries to attach some alternative versions to the end of this project, and nice as they are, they’re not exactly heavy hitters. Even the most dedicated listeners would be hard-pressed to find a love for Bev’s Trousers. Earlier versions of All Over the World and Auntie are, at the very least, of interest. It’s a style of release Dylan did not popularise, but carried out, in the 1970s with Greatest Hits. Sometimes a listener must wait years, if not decades, for a song of interest to be released. Those pieces which were performed live countless times but not released in any capacity until they were redundant to the artist on stage. It happened for Dylan, who has the luxury of a backlog worth seeking out. ELO does not.  

Their hits are their hits, and there is little beyond that. A handful of deep cut pieces from Out of the Blue are interesting, and the acoustic versions Lynne and Richard Tandy provided after the second reunion are delightful. None of that makes it onto Early ELO. Inevitabilities like Roll Over Beethoven and Showdown are featured, but they appear on just about every compilation made to cash in on the band’s name. Without them, Early ELO would have to rely on worthy deep cuts like Kuiama and In Old England Town. Neither is a defining moment for the band, few of these songs would truly get to grips with ELO as an inspired musical outfit, but they do provide fans a way to listen to all three albums in one go.  

So too does a queued Spotify playlist, or just buying three CDs. A fact of compilation efforts is the bulk are now redundant. There are few, if any, that offer the listener a reason to return. Some will feature worthy alternative versions, others will include rarities which are not released elsewhere. Early ELO does neither. It compiles what people will already know about the band in a safe manner, almost unchanged if you compare the tracklist with the trilogy of albums at hand. Nothing lazy about it, but questionable in its context of sharing the earliest works of the band in an order which makes the concept of their progressive rock days minimal at best. Early ELO is for nobody, but even on release, when it was a relevant way of listening to the group’s work, it struggles to find the energy needed to excite a listener.