A New World Record

It’s weirdly fitting that the cover to Out of the Blue‘s immediate predecessor depicts the neon-jukebox monolith ELO logo looming over a cityscape, as if it were on its initial flight up into the stratosphere to fulfill the group’s eventual destiny as the fully operational baroque-rock space station they’d be in ’77. But A New World Record is an Apollo 11 in itself for the band, cited by Jeff Lynne himself as the moment his sonic outlook for the band really started to sound on wax the way it did in his head. As much as the prog-adjacent dangers of mixing rock and classical scared purist critics away from their first few LPs, by ’76 it was clear that Lynne was hearing the same symphonies Holland-Dozier-Holland did. So it gets ornate, but to integrally fun, no-bullshit ends: the way the quasi-operatic fanfare of opener “Tightrope” melts into the best T. Rex-ian boogie Marc Bolan seemed no longer capable of writing, how the strings in the uptempo locomotion of “So Fine” are less Philharmonic than Philly harmonics, how the god of hooks smiled upon “Livin’ Thing” enough to not only excuse its tongue-in-cheek pseudoflamenco intro, but make it feel like the best way to announce you’re throwing down the falsetto-pop-greatness gauntlet at the Bee Gees’ feet. There’s an all-timer of a glow-up, too: when ELO’s parent group The Move recorded the Lynne-penned power-pop gem “Do Ya” half a decade earlier, Roy Wood belted “look out, baby, there’s a plane a-comin’” at the end; five years and a much bigger budget later, Lynne just engineered a crescendo that made it sound like the Concorde was landing.