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5.0 out of 5 stars
Hollywood in your own livingroom, 23 Feb 2001
This and their preceding album, "On The Third Day", represent for me the quintessential ELO. They hadn't yet started going all insipid and pop -- nor had they begun to attempt dreadful country and western pastiches -- and the uninitiated will be astonished by just how floor shakingly HEAVY this sounds. If the magnificent "On The Third Day" was heavy metal with cellos (and occasional radio-unfriendly swearing!), "Eldorado" throws in a bit of everything just to see what sticks -- light opera, roaring rock'n'roll, chundering violin and brass sections, ethereal strings, Hollywood-swooning angelic choirs, distorted voice-overs, rough and dirty heavy rock, heart-breaking ballads, a song about Robin Hood -- all wrapped up in a bizarre hallucinogenic concept album which takes bits of the Pretty Thing's "Parachute" (city life versus country life) and regurgitates it as a weirdo dream sequence based on the idea of escape into hopeless fantasy (you know, bored office bloke daydreaming about being a knight in armour, or a rock star, or hacking his way toward the city of gold itself), all the tracks merging into one another and the final chord of side one held over onto side two. Totally over the top, of course, but it's dazzling stuff. The drums especially blow your ears out, Bev Bevan never sounded so LOUD (and that's saying something for him!). Best of the lot is probably "Boy Blue" which has to be one of the strangest singalongs of all time. The anti-war message (are such things dated now?) still makes me laugh put against this "we kicked them in the heads, boys!" gungho backing. "Can't Get It Out Of My Head" is the emotional high-light, though it's the title track with its keening birdlike guitars which remain in the memory longest, long after the dream itself has faded... The cover shows another dreamer, Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, fending off the wicked witch's attempts to grab the ruby slippers which will take her home. It's an apt image -- the album is meant to reflect the huge production values of those old musical scores of the 1930s, and it succeeds brilliantly. I can't recommend it enough.
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