 George Harrison Someone get Jeff Lynne away from the console! He's going overboard again! Cloud Nine should be released in a box set along with the two Traveling Wilburys albums and Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever, and the box set could be called The Golden Age of Jeff Lynne's Catchy Bombast. ELO's frontman is a great producer, but his sound is so distinctive that it can tend to overshadow the songs it is applied to – Cloud Nine, more than any album outside of the ELO catalog, demonstrates this. With Full Moon Fever and the Traveling Wilburys albums, the sound served the songs pretty well, because those were very playful albums, whereas this comeback effort from George Harrison contained some of Harrison's strongest material in years. Listening now, it's sort of hard to recognize them as such. In 1987 it sounded awesome, but it hasn't dated well. Lots of those chunk-a-chunk-a guitars that drive many people crazy , and that reverby snare sound that drives right up the middle of every song, millions of harmony vocals, and little guitar lines running away from the vocal, plus the trademark ELO synths dribbling here and there. I mean, this was awesome for "Xanadu," but for Harrison, understatement is the name of the game. On the other hand, it's nice to hear Harrison putting out such an aggressively poppy album, and one with a lot of focus (my apologies to fans of Gone Troppo). But with so much sonic mayhem, it'd be a lie to say the album is a knockout punch. Could've been. The songs are excellent, and surprised longtime Beatles fans like myself who'd gotten very used to predictably forgettable solo albums from George and Ringo in particular (Paul's were predictably great or enraging). Harrison's spiritual quest is kept at bay, rekindling the sense of humor he'd demonstrated with projects like The Rutles. "When We Was Fab" throws a ton of Beatles in-jokes around, from "I Am the Walrus" style whooos to a self-deprecating sitar outro, while "Devil's Radio" attacks that ultimate evil, gossip. Well, at least the harmonies are good. "Just For Today" is a surprisingly affecting piano-based ballad a la "Imagine," quite a departure for Beatle George of "Taxman" fame. Probably the track that stands up best is "Breath Away From Heaven," a great Chinese-flavored ballad that was featured in the Madonna/Sean Penn flick Shanghai Surprise, which Harrison's film company produced. Lynne's Svengalism is kept to a minimum on this one. Lots of the tracks suffer from mid-80s Eric Clapton being present on them, such as the title track, which has a decided "It's in the Way That You Use It" vibe (not a compliment, in fact, quite the opposite) – Clapton plays guitar throughout, and other notable fellas in the band are Elton John on piano, Gary "Dream Weaver" Wright, and Jim Horn on baritone and tenor sax – well, he's not notable except that his name is Jim Horn, and he plays horns. "Someplace Else" and "This is Love" are great love songs, "Wreck of the Hesperus" and "Fish on the Sand" are good rock songs undermined by that Lynne influence (they should have gotten Lynne Russell). I'm not opposed to Jeff Lynne on principle, but he's absolutely out of control on this album – in places it's almost like Harrison is merely the Johnny Bravo coming in to do vocals. Of course, the eternal guilty pleasure "Got My Mind Set on You" is always worth a listen, even though that one is probably the most egregious Jeff Lynne track on the album. That song more than any of these was the big shocker for Beatle fans, as Harrison had never done anything even close to that sort of whimsy before, and it paid off, giving him his first #1 hit in like 17 years. The remastered edition adds "Shanghai Surprise" and "Zig Zag," both taken from the aforementioned film. These are a treat to hear again, as they have the loose and humorous vibe of the Wilburys stuff. "Shanghai Surprise" is hilarious, one of George's most neglected songs, featuring completely uncharacteristic, and quite funny, use of female vocals. Had the film been a hit, so might the song have been … it's sort of like the Traveling Wilburys rewriting "One Night in Bangkok." "Zig Zag" is a fake speakeasy strutter that surely made Harrison and Jeff Lynne laugh a lot when they played it back.
Review by Penny Oat-Groat |