By ignoring the band's first two albums, the Roy Wood-dominated Electric Light Orchestra and the transitional ELO II, the 1979 singles compilation ELO's Greatest Hits presents a somewhat skewed vision of the band…

When Jeff Lynne was growing up, he listened to music on longwave radio, soaking up all the sounds coming through the big radio in the living room. His 2012 tribute to these days, appropriately called Long Wave, is a far-reaching salute to the glory days of pop in the years before the Beatles. It's too easy to peg this as a standards album, a designation that isn't quite accurate. Lynne may cover many show tunes along with '50s favorites of big-band vocalists but he spends nearly as much time with rock & roll, and not just the operatic pop of his fellow Traveling Wilbury Roy Orbison, either. He cranks through Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock," slides into the silken harmonies of the Everly Brothers on "So Sad," and grooves through Don Covay's "Mercy, Mercy."

Alone in the Universe isn't the first Jeff Lynne album of the 21st century, nor is it the first Electric Light Orchestra of the 21st century. That honor belongs to Zoom, a 2001 comeback that faded quickly into history books, its lack of success blamed in some quarters on Lynne's reluctance to tour. If Jeff didn't want to hit the road, his old bandmate Bev Bevan had no problem constituting a lineup and touring under the name ELO Part II, whose presence somewhat explains why Alone in the Universe is credited to the somewhat convoluted Jeff Lynne's ELO – a truncation of the band's full name that also assigns credit where it's due, as most listeners associate this majestic post-Abbey Road pop with Lynne alone.

Electric Light Orchestra's 2012 concert album Live brings together tracks Jeff Lynne and his band recorded for a PBS special at CBS Television City in 2001. This is the ensemble that toured in support of ELO's 2001 studio album, Zoom, and appeared on VH1 Storytellers. Lynne has always been an avowed studio rat, more comfortable crafting his rock productions behind a soundboard than playing them in front of a live audience. This is partly the reason that the Lynne-helmed version of ELO stopped touring after 1981's Time. Subsequently, there haven't been very many proper ELO concert albums. Which is not to say that the band doesn't sound fantastic here, because it does. Lynne is a musical perfectionist who never fails to deliver on the grand, orchestral rock aesthetic he crafted on so many classic albums. All of which makes this 2001 collection a welcome addition to ELO's discography.

Unlike either its predecessor Alone in the Universe or 2001's Zoom, From out of Nowhere didn't appear after a prolonged period of silence from Jeff Lynne's ELO. It arrived in November of 2019, nearly exactly four years after Alone in the Universe, a rapid turnaround that recalls Lynne's work schedule as a bandleader and producer in the 1970s and '80s. That's not the only way From out of Nowhere conjures memories of the past. From the spaceship hovering on its record cover to the song title "Sci-Fi Woman" stirring up the ghost of "Evil Woman," the album is designed to sound and feel like an Electric Light Orchestra album from the late 1970s.

Jeff Lynne revived Electric Light Orchestra in 2015 – due to legal reasons, they were now called Jeff Lynne's ELO – releasing a comeback album called Alone in the Universe and steadily mounting a return to the road. Several dates happened in 2016, but the tour reached its apex in June 2017, when the group played in front of 60,000 people at London's Wembley Stadium. Released five months after that June 24 gig, Wembley or Bust – which was accompanied by a concert film – features the entirety of the gig, and if it's not heard too closely, it could sometimes be mistaken for an ELO greatest-hits album. Lynne re-creates the arrangements of his studio work throughout the concert; even when the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle with Care" is hauled out, it sounds like it did on record. The vocals are where the seams show, as Lynne is a little rougher and lower than he was at his peak. Although this is a noticeable difference, it's hardly enough to mar what amounts to a thoroughly enjoyable – and perhaps a tad triumphant – return to live performance for Jeff Lynne.

This is the album where Jeff Lynne finally found the sound he'd wanted since co-founding Electric Light Orchestra three years earlier. Up to this point, most of the group's music had been self-contained – Lynne, Richard Tandy, et al., providing whatever was needed, vocally or instrumentally, even if it meant overdubbing their work layer upon layer. Lynne saw the limitations of this process, however, and opted for the presence of an orchestra – it was only 30 pieces, but the result was a much richer musical palette than the group had ever had to work with, and their most ambitious and successful record up to that time. Indeed, Eldorado was strongly reminiscent in some ways of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) are an English rock band formed in Birmingham in 1970 by songwriters-multi-instrumentalists Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood with drummer Bev Bevan. Their music is characterised by a fusion of Beatlesque pop, classical arrangements and futuristic iconography. After Wood's departure in 1972, Lynne became the band's sole leader, arranging and producing every album while writing nearly all of their original material. For their initial tenure, Lynne, Bevan and keyboardist Richard Tandy were the group's only consistent members.

By ignoring the band's first two albums, the Roy Wood-dominated Electric Light Orchestra and the transitional ELO II, the 1979 singles compilation ELO's Greatest Hits presents a somewhat skewed vision of the band. Ironically, this revision has become the normative view of the band: slick, almost mechanical purveyors of undeniably catchy but somewhat soulless hit singles. "Evil Woman," "Showdown," "Turn to Stone," "Telephone Line," "Strange Magic" – anyone who was anywhere near a radio in the latter half of the '70s knows them all by heart, whether they like them or not. But ELO's Greatest Hits does a far graver disservice to the Electric Light Orchestra's oeuvre.