ARTIST: L.E.O.
TITLE: Alpacas Orgling
LABEL: Cheap Lullaby
GENRE: Rock
TIME: 33:49 min
SIZE:  52,7 MB
RIP DATE: Sep-21-2006
RELEASE DATE: Oct-17-2006
WEBSITE: n/a

Track List:

01. Overture                                   00:33
02. Goodbye Innocence                          03:51
03. Ya Had Me Goin'                            03:10
04. Distracted                                 04:18
05. Make Me                                    03:00
06. The Ol' College Try                        03:44
07. Nothin' Will Ever Change                   04:13
08. Don't Let It Go                            03:24
09. Private Line                               03:13
10. Sukaz Are Born Every Minute                04:23

Release Notes:

L.E.O.'s Alpacas Orgling is an ingeniously arranged
evocation of the orchestral pop-rock of the
mid-70's, a sound built for the AM-radio pop charts
of the time but also cool enough to resonate for
years on the FM dial. It's a style epitomized by the
sweeping productions of the Electric Light
Orchestra, which created a technologically enhanced
wall of sound as grand as Phil Spector's "teenage
symphonies" of the mid-sixties.

Among the collaborators assembled as L.E.O. are
vocalist Andy Sturmer from nineties power pop-icons
Jellyfish; singer-guitarist Mike Viola, formerly of
The Candy Butchers and co-writer of the
Oscar-nominated movie theme, "That Thing You Do!";
multi-platinum producer John Fields; Papas Fritas
founder/producer Tony Goddess; Matt Mahaffey of the
acclaimed one-man-band Self; Jason Scheff, vocalist
and bassist for Chicago; singer-songwriter Paula
Kelly; Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman; and even
the Hanson brothers.

This wildly eclectic crew was brought together by
Boston pop auteur Bleu (William James McAuley III),
who decided to embark on this unique project four
years ago and managed to cajole his many far-flung
pals to join him for the ride.

Alpacas Orgling, Bleu explains, had its genesis in
an exchange with his songwriter friend Dan Wilson,
late of the band Semi-Sonic. Wilson was recounting
stories that producer Rick Rubin had told him about
the unusual methods Electric Light Orchestra
mastermind Jeff Lynne employed to make records, both
for himself and his bands and for such artists as
The Beatles, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty
and the studio super-group The Traveling Wilburys.

Bleu was intrigued. Alpacas Orgling, he explains,
"started out as an excuse to try out some of these
ideas Dan had told me about. Lynne has a very
idiosyncratic way of recording. Looking back, I have
no idea if these stories were true, but it all
seemed to make a lot of sense to me at the time. I
thought, I've got to try these things out to see if
they work. So the project started out very slowly as
a goof, getting together with different friends to
see if we could write a Jeff Lynne-inspired song.
Sometimes I would try specifically to emulate
something he had done or pick it apart and put it
back together. As it went along, the project morphed
into more of an excuse to record with this
incredibly talented group of likeminded musicians."

One could say that L.E.O. is a 21st century, alt-pop
version of the Traveling Wilburys, filtering ELO and
like-minded groups through a modern, and more than a
little subversive, sensibility. The performers use
the same sort of distance-bridging technology as the
Postal Service did on its groundbreaking Give Up; in
fact, the L.E.O.-ers were lucky enough to have even
more programs and bandwidth at their disposal. Many
parts of this album were recorded remotely by the
individual musicians and bounced back and forth via
computer. As Bleu explains, "That was another big
idea behind the project: almost everybody involved
is a producer and has a home studio set-up and loves
other producers. I basically executive-produced the
album; everyone else produced their own parts. That
was one of my goals, to get all these producers and
let them do their thing and see what happens."