It's a strange album this. By his own admission, Jeff Lynnne's enthusiasm for ELO had waned greatly by this point, feeling himself constricted by the orchestral sounds that were the band's trademark. BoP was an attempt to escape from this and inject some new life into things.
By this stage, ELO was only really Lynne, Richard Tandy and Bev Bevan, so arrangements were very much more pared down. In hindsight of course, we know that things didn't really work and that Lynne went off to produce, while Bevan ended up in ELO II. Part of the reason this was the quality of the material, which wasn't as strong as some of ELO's earlier triumphs, while part was due to changing public mood. The world had moved on and ELO didn't really figure anymore.
While not hitting their earlier heights, the basic album still has some extremely strong material on it, mostly in the opening half. Indeed, the first three songs, Heaven Only Knows, So Serious and Getting To The Point are all well crafted. The latter sounds as if it could have sat on 1979's Discovery while the first two are very strongly driven by rhythm. The only slight distraction is the chorus singing of So Seri-uss in the later. Calling America is, of course, very familiar to any ELO fan and the band's last major hit. The version of Endless Lies that made it to this album is actually less strong than the version that failed to make the cut on Secret Messages, where the Roy Orbison vibe Lynne was looking for seemed just that little bit better realised. The closer, Send It, is another nice straight up and down rock 'n' roll number, where the instrumentation makes it a novel treat and a fun listen.
The expanded edition's extras are mostly a collection of alternative versions, mostly of some interest (the alternative vision of the album's opener Heaven Only Knows is particularly diverting). But the high points are In For The Kill, later to become the more polished Caught In A Trap (though I preferred the lyric in the former) and, for me at least, the high point of the whole album: the barnstorming, throbbing Destination Unknown. I can't really imagine why this was relegated to a B-side and didn't make the original album because this is simply fabulous and my principal reason for buying this expanded edition.
In all, this is probably an album that the casual listener might regard with mild interest but little else, while many fans may want it for completeness. There are things to admire and appreciate, but less here to love than in the band's true heyday.