In the first entry I wrote on this blog, I noted that this whole musical venture was something to tide over a period of unemployment. Suffice to say, as my several-month-long absence probably illustrated, said period did not last very long. Luckily I'm much happier in my current job than in my last, and I'm finally settled enough to try and get back into these reviews. I'll try and sustain some momentum, but you'll be pleased to know that I plan on being slightly less verbose. So feel free to call me out if I start to waffle unduly. I'm rekindling the blog's flame with my first double album review, from an artist I've only really become properly acquainted with very recently.
While many consider 1973's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road to be Elton John's magnum opus, I would like to submit a different candidate from his extensive catalogue of 30+ albums for this esteemed title. Comparable not only in length but also sheer breadth of styles, 1976's Blue Moves is the heavier, darker and more mature selection of the two double LPs. Whereas Goodbye Yellow Brick Road boasts a fistful of commercial hits and had the good fortune to release at the apex of Elton's first wave of international popularity in the early 70's, Blue Moves suffered from poor timing, the initial Rocket Man zeitgeist waning, and from being a little too niche overall to spawn any real radio-ready ear-worms. That said, something I have learned from a recent Rocketman-fuelled dive into his back catalogue is that Elton's hit singles are not necessarily the best work on their respective albums.
- Tonight
- One Horse Town
- Chameleon
- Crazy Water
- Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word
- Where's The Shoorah?
- Bite Your Lip (Get Up And Dance!)
- Shoulder Holster
- Someone's Final Song
- Idol
- The Wide-Eyed And The Laughing
- Out Of The Blue
- Cage The Songbird
- If There's A God In Heaven (What's He Waiting For?)
- Between Seventeen And Twenty
- Boogie Pilgrim
(Exempt from total score: Your Starter For... & Theme For A Non-Existent TV Series)
Average Score: 6.25
In fact, I would argue that Elton excels when he's not restrained by any kind of commercial considerations. The monumental, prog-rock intro of Tonight does (with greater panache) what Funeral For A Friend did on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, with a really dynamite song attached to the instrumental part as a payoff. Stripped back, piano-led ballads like Chameleon and Where's The Shoorah? give Elton the reins to do what he does best; bring lashings of amplitude and flair to raw material that is already imbued with emotion and thoughtful lyrics by longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin.
There are no bad tracks per-say - even my lowest rated, Boogie Pilgrim, has some merit as a kind of p-funk venture that highlights Elton's prevalent infatuation with all facets of Americana. Generally speaking, the worst tracks are the more 'colour by number' songs - the ones where it feels like he's literally just taken the lyrics and plopped them into a set sequence of music, rather than feeling the words and really measuring them against the scoring. The former category of song (If There's A God In Heaven is the most glaring example) feels overly neat and systematic, the lines too squarely and rudimentarily spaced within the music to feel like anything more than a perfunctory effort. Compare these, frankly, filler tracks to the moodier cuts, less regimented and restrained, like the jazz bar-friendly Idol, or the frenetic energy and no-holds-barred typhoon of riffing present in Bite Your Lip, and you can tell that Elton was really having fun with the material in the latter mentions.
For a double album, it doesn't feel bloated; instead it feels sweepingly eclectic, utilising a diverse spectrum of styles that feels like a true representation of every hue in Elton's musical paintbox. The real throwaways are thankfully exempt from score - meticulously made yet cheap-sounding minute and a half instrumentals that date the album horrifically and disrupt the soul felt throughout. These would undoubtedly knock the score down a few notches if they were substantial enough to be considered bonafide songs.
Blue Moves maintains a level of respect on the various published ranked lists of Elton's albums, but it seldom makes the top 10. I knew upon first listen that I preferred it to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, the usual number one finisher, but why exactly was I favouring the more obscure and elusive of the two works? Perhaps the more introspective, esoteric manifestations of the world are just what speak to me over the measured successes (which I realise, upon reading that sentence, is just an insufferably hipster way of saying that I'm an insufferable hipster). However, I don't think such a statement is a universal truth about me - I'm sure this will become apparent in future reviews! No, more likely I was just fortunate enough to discover this album at exactly the right time for me to understand and appreciate what it offers. I doubt I would have had the insight and maturity necessary to appreciate it so much in my teens or 20s. In this phase of my life, I'm able to perceive Blue Moves as a dazzling chocolate box of songs, ranging from the thoroughly glamorous to the openly vulnerable, something about it just feeling that little bit more special to me than the rest of Elton's discography. It may not have had the best timing in the context of his career, but in terms of my discovery of it, the timing couldn't have been any better.
