Electric Light Orchestra V Queen

Put me down for Queen. ELO took an album or two to get up to speed, and then their classic period is comparatively brief; Queen had their sound nailed down straight out of the gate and put out more top-flight albums than ELO ever did, in my book.

I'd pick virtually any musical act over ELO.  So, yeah.

Not much into ELO, so no vote. 

Anyway, Queen's style was anticipated by Sparks who did it WITHOUT the pastiche approach that Queen favoured in not only Bohemian..but many other well regarded songs like March of the Black Queen and went for 3-4 minute slabs of smart pop/rock instead.  Sparks also tried many more things so it's not possible for me to hold Queen's compositional skills in the same high regard as I would have before.  Yeah, mainly about the flamboyance of Mercury and May. And as much as I like Freddie's singing, he's NOT my favourite rock singer and is pretty weak when it comes to truly melancholic moments.  His singing on the first section of Bohemian is overwrought but it works because of the band's generally campy style of music.  

TheLionOfPrague wrote: giselle wrote: I prefer ELO because Jeff Lynne is much superior songwriter to anything anyone in Queen can produce, and even though Queen are the superior musicians and a better group. Jeff Lynne is a great songwriter, but not better  than Freddie.

Freddie was a great singer and showman, but he couldn't write a song to save his life (!); the 'songs' he did write were amazingly old-fashioned (and camp!) for someone from a supposedly-heavy Rock group. Even the best piece he ever did - parts of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' - were snatches of good melody (but with meaningless lyrics) interspersed with trivial/mundane musical interludes heavily laced with bad taste which only a group peddling excess as a norm could get away with. So no, in my opinion Freddie wasn't even in the first league of songwriters, though he certainly had plenty going for him in other ways.

giselle wrote: I prefer ELO because Jeff Lynne is much superior songwriter to anything anyone in Queen can produce, and even though Queen are the superior musicians and a better group.

 I'll take ELO, just because they were more consistent to me. Queen had 4 writers, and sometimes wrote boring songs. Jeff Lynne, in my honest and seemingly unique opinion, never wrote a bad song.

ELO by a thousand miles.  They have some AMAZING work (actually a lot of amazing work), some okay work, and some that I could take of leave.  

Edited by himtroy - August 21 2010 at 12:59

Sorry, I was looking at the picture (with recent tracks and top artists from last.fm), and since AtomicCrimsonRush had pictures of Pink Floyd and Genesis I was reading too much into it.

My fault...

I think Snow Boy is a Genesis fan. Fair enough. I think I moved off track a little with the Beatles, Aginor with Roy (perhaps) and Snow Boy with Genesis.

(This thread was originally ELO-v-Queen)

But yes, to get to the last point, Roy Orbison was perhaps the greatest voice ever recorded (at least in non-classical music). Even Elvis said so...

This is easy for me because I think ELO suck the big one.