Electric Light Orchestra

A New World Record (1976)

 

  1. Tightrope
  2. Telephone Line
  3. Rockaria!
  4. Mission (A New World Record)
  5. So Fine
  6. Livin' Thing
  7. Above the Cloud
  8. Do Ya
  9. Shangri-La
  
  
  
  

This is it. The sweet spot. The moment where Electric Light Orchestra, after years of lineup changes, concept albums, and overdubbed cellos, finally pulled everything into focus. A New World Record isn’t just the most accessible record they’d made up to this point — it’s arguably the one that defined them. Start to finish, the band fires on all cylinders, and the result is an album that balances ambition, polish, and pure pop melody better than just about anything else in their catalog.

By this point, ELO had pretty much become Jeff Lynne’s personal playground. He was writing everything, producing everything, and sculpting the sound with the kind of precision that suggested a man who knew exactly what he wanted — and had finally figured out how to get it. Bev Bevan (still pounding away from the Move days) and keyboardist Richard Tandy remained essential cogs, but the rest of the band was, as ever, something of a revolving door. Still, for this brief stretch in the mid-‘70s, the lineup held steady just long enough to create something close to cohesion.

And it shows.

Telephone Line is the obvious centerpiece — one of the great lost-love ballads of the decade, and a song that made rotary phones sound romantic. It was the band’s first top ten hit in both the U.S. and U.K., and it still holds up beautifully — wistful, melodic, and anchored by one of Lynne’s finest vocal performances. You could almost stop there and call the album a success.

But you’d be missing out. Living Thing is here too — all frantic strings and high-gloss funk, a song that shouldn’t work on paper but somehow ends up being one of their most irresistible moments. Tightrope, the opener, is one of the great deep cuts — a sweeping, theatrical slow-burn that builds into a full-on pop anthem. It never got the radio play it deserved, but it became a live staple for good reason.

Elsewhere, Lynne indulges a little — but not too much. Rockaria! is the kind of tongue-in-cheek classical-meets-rock track that only ELO could attempt with a straight face. Mission (A World Record) leans into sci-fi themes and studio effects, sounding like a late-night experiment in tape loops and neon dreams. Neither track adds much to the emotional core of the album, but both are harmless fun — and for once, the indulgences don’t derail the whole show.

Do Ya, a throwback from Lynne’s Move days, gets a punchy revamp and fits right in — proving that even their hardest-rocking moments still had a place in the ELO universe. Above the Clouds, a brief interlude featuring bassist Kelly Groucutt on lead vocals, floats by pleasantly and reminds us that even the supporting cast had their moments.

And then there’s Shangri-La, the closer — sweeping, symphonic, and slightly melancholy, it’s a perfect send-off, even if it includes one of Lynne’s more questionable lyrical choices (“Faded like the Beatles on 'Hey Jude'” is... well, let’s call it a stretch). But the song earns it.

Looking back, it’s easy to call this the peak. Later albums would sell more and get flashier, but they’d also start to feel like variations on a theme. Here, the balance is perfect. The band was still mysterious enough to be intriguing, yet polished enough to fill arenas. And somehow, they made strings, synths, choirs, and Beatlesque harmonies all live happily under the same roof.

They’d still have some hits to come. But A New World Record is where it all came together — cleanly, confidently, and with style to spare.

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