Sealion II

The great thing about "The Best of ELO" is that it is $9.99 for 29 songs on iTunes. How can you not love that? Even if only one-third of the album was listenable you would get a good return on the money.

The Electric Light Orchestra is one of those bands that rock critics love to hate. This is because, well, it's an orchestra. That plays rock and roll. They do a cover of "Roll Over Beethoven" that starts with Beethoven's 5th. That's just the kind of band they are.

This is also the kind of thing that really gets the average rock critic's goat. But this is a post about The Best of ELO, not Rock Criticism: Its Many Failures of Imagination, so let's give that pass at present.

There are a whole lot of really entertaining songs on this album, along with quite a fair number where, well, the weaknesses of ELO's premise are abundantly evident (please, not the orchestral disco!). There's lots and lots of synthesizer, and lots of distorted vocals, and the titular orchestra, and generally lots of evidence that Jeff Lynne (founder and lead vocalist) spent a lot of time in production. In addition to the radio stalwarts ("Do Ya", "Telephone Line", "Don't Bring Me Down" et al.) there are a number of other really fun songs: "Four Little Diamonds", "Calling America" and "So Serious" are getting consistent iPod play over in this neck of the woods.

To sum up:
Musical Quality: 7.5 out of 10.
Weirdness: 7 out of 10 (we're running strong on the weird albums here. This goes up and down a lot--some of these songs are pretty standard 70s synth-rock, and then you get the opera singer coming in on "Rockaria" and watch that needle spike, ladies and gentlemen!)
Obscurity: 4 out of 10. This has all the radio favorites, so a classic-rock radio listener will see 8-10 songs here that are familiar.

Buy/Sell/Hold: Buy! If you like ELO on the radio, anyway. Hey, as it said at the top, $10 for 29 songs!

It would get:

Musical Quality: 9 out of 10.
Weirdness: 8 out of 10. (Britney Spears and medieval madrigal and rounds on the same album.)
Obscurity: 7 out of 10.

Recommendation: Buy, Buy, Buy!

By Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band.

"A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?"

How you react to that statement is probably a good indication of how you will react to the album Trout Mask Replica.

This is easily the weirdest music I have ever bought and possibly the weirdest music (when it is music) I've ever listened to. Suppose you had a bunch of musically talented friends with a recording studio in their basement, and a random assortment of instruments, and a few songs they were working on for their album. Late one evening everyone gets mentally altered and goes down to the basement and does stuff for a couple of hours with the recording tape running, and when your friend who owns the studio finds it he does a little bit of post-production, and, well, there you go.

This is actually one of the most famous of experimental rock music albums--along with Weasels Ripped My Flesh! and some of Frank Zappa's other stuff.

How does it score (scales 0-10, mostly)?

Musical Quality: Incomplete. A lot of this is, er, not really "songs". Some of it isn't music (I don't think).

Weirdness: 15. The gold standard for Weirdness. I can't even measure anything else on the Weirdness scale if I put Trout Mask Replica at 10.

Obscurity: 8. It's pretty out there.

Recommendation (Buy, Sell, Hold): Hold. I'm not sorry I bought it, but, well, it didn't inspire me to run out and get all the other Beefhearts.