No Answer (Electric Light Orchestra, 1971)

This is a great album. Don't let the bleak title fool you (read the story here). It's the culmination of everything Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood had been working toward through the 1960's in the Idle Race and the Move respectively. By decade's end the two joined forces in the Move, and redesigned the band as the cello-centric Electric Light Orchestra. (Meanwhile the Lynne-less Idle Race would disband in 1972.) Playing cellos and other bowed string instruments in rock music wasn't a new thing. In fact a whole subgenre, "baroque pop" was alive and well through the latter half of the 1960's. The cello would appear in unusual places like Beatles albums and songs by the Spencer Davis Group and the Hollies. ELO would take all of this as a beginning, and raise the cello profile to the next level, as the heir apparent to the electric guitar.

For those more familiar with ELO's larger-than-life era from the mid-to-late 1970's, this album is a considerable shock to the system. On no other album is the "orchestra" part of the name so heavily emphasized, be it in the hard-sawing cellos of the "10538 Overture" or through instrumental tableaus such as "The Battle of Marston Moor" or "Manhattan Rumble" (the former being so dense that drummer Bev Bevan refused to participate). In fact, the core trio of the initial ELO (Bevan, Wood, and Lynne) is all portrayed sitting behind cellos, rather than their regular instruments, leading one of believe they were forecasting Apocalyptica 25 years ahead of schedule. The main reason this album stands apart from the rest of the ELO catalog is Roy Wood. Although Lynne is fairly non-commercial on this album, Wood's compositions in particular don't seem particularly hit-oriented and are usually the darker, moodier ones, like the Eleanor Rigby-esque "Look at Me Now". On the other hand, his "Jumping Biz" (a more-than-obvious nod to "Classical Gas") is one of the most gleeful points of the entire album.

Like a precious substance made in the lab, the lifespan (half life?) of the original ELO was brutally short, "decaying" into Lynne and Bevan's more commercially successful ELO (which compartmentalized the "orchestra" and re-emphasized more tradition rock instrumentation), and Wood's Wizzard, a commercially disastrous quasi-solo venture he rode to oblivion. Maybe it was too good to be true to keep Lynne and Wood together beyond a single album. Nevertheless, as stated at the beginning this is a great album. You can't dance to it, but even some of the weirder songs will invariably get stuck in your head.