Blue Jays

Blue Jays
Justin Hayward and John Lodge
Threshold THS 14
Released: March 1975
Chart Peak: #16
Weeks Charted: 23

John LodgeJustin HaywardAt least in terms of sound, Justin Hayward and John Lodge, guitarist and bass player, respectively, with the currently inactive Moody Blues, have created in Blue Jays the ultimate Moody Blues album. It is the same sound that established the Moodys’ mass popularity in 1968 with Days of Future Passed: basic rock instrumentation heavily overlaid with Mellotron or string orchestra, and vocals treated as instruments in the Wagnerian manner. In strictly musical terms, however, the Moody Blues are far from Wagnerian. Simple melodic themes are elongated to accomodate a dramatic sense about as sophisticated as a mediocre Fifties soundtrack, their emotional import exaggerated by such devices as rapidly swelling orchestration and gargantuan crescendo.

Justin Hayward and John Lodge - Blue Jays
Original album advertising art.
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It can be convincingly argued that the Moody Blues, as much as any act, helped reassert orchestral sound into the mainstream of pop music at a time when unornamented hard rock was at its peak of popularity and softness was “out.” They did this by creating “psychedelic” mood music for the youth market, shrewdly organizing their albums as “trips,” and selling it as rock. The formula worked. In the seven years since Days of Future Passed, with producer Tony Clarke, the Moody Blues sensibly did not tamper much with the sound that had made them popular except to improve it technologically. As a result, Blue Jays leaps off the turntable, a tidal wave of romantic bombast that would have reduced Cecil B. DeMille to jelly.