Eldorado, a Symphony by Electric Light Orchestra
Now, up until this point, I don't think I've featured any guilty pleasures (well, Omnio is pretty ridiculous). I hope that snobbier music lovers will toss away all their closed-minded stereotypes about ELO. Ignore all those big heads that quickly label them 70's pop crap. Jeff Lynne is one of rock's most dismissed songwriters of the 1970's. Now, it is hard to look past many of the unfortunate stylistic choices he made that seem so dated: excessive vocoders, dense spacey keyboards, and far too much falsetto. For every "Don't bring me down Bruce" though, there is a song like "Can't Get it out of my Head", that is just simply some of the catchiest songwriting since the Beatles.
This album suffers far less of the things that label ELO as "silly", making it a good place to start and for some a good place to stop listening to ELO. Like most classic bands, it with their fourth album that ELO finally found their stride. This was fortunately before Jeff Lynne figured out that he could sell more records if he sang like a girl. They did a flawless job of blending a rock band with an orchestra. Whereas other classics of this style such as Days of Future Passed supplemented their rock songs with short orchestral sections, Eldorado sound like one giant band that happens to have about 30 members. The skillfully dense arrangements are done so well, the more stripped-down songs (if a full rock band with a horn section can be considered stripped-down) such as "Illusions in G Major" just sound weak. That said, this album is strong from start to finish. Easily one of the best albums of the early 70's.
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