I don’t know about where you live but it was sunny and nice and all blue sky day over here on the Oregon coast yesterday. So I naturally played some happy music by Electric Light Orchestra as soon as I could — their 1977 album Out of the Blue, arguably one of the greatest records in rock history, approaching such canonical recordings as Sister Lovers, Loveless and Exile on Main Street. It was also the first record I bought with my own money, the week that it was released, so I might have a wee bit of personal nostalgia going on with my fanboy adoration of the thing.

For this double album with an intergalactic spaceship with a loading bay for an eight track tape on the cover, lead ELO dude Jeff Lynne took the maximalist approach he perfected on A New World Record and multiplied it by itself. The result is one of the most beautifully bombastic things you’ll ever hear, with so much information packed into each genre exercise — excuse me, song. Did I mention that these songs are intense? They’re more intense the way eating a bowl of cookie dough at once is intense. But ELO could be said to share a lot with metal in three regards: anthemicness, stiffness, and a pummeling that’s supposedly related to European classical music.They rise above all these faults remarkably well.

“Mr Blue Sky,” which closes side three on the vinyl version, might be the best thing they ever did. It even has a decent lyric, in the line, “Hey you with the pretty face/ welcome to the human race.” It’s so unabashedly joyous, earnest and geeky. No wonder critics and real rock dudes and dudettes don’t take this stuff seriously. None of the songs are even about heroin, suicidal depression or revolution, man! A song this good can make me happy for days.

—DJ Yeti