The first half of this cd sounds like the great long lost ELO album. The rest of it sounds like the great long lost album by the Move.

Wow.

On his solo debut of artsy, brilliantly retro British style pop and rock, Bedsit Poets co-founder and singer Edward Rogers has assembled a dream team behind him. Co-writing the songs and playing guitar and keys is George Usher, who’s only been writing great powerpop songs since he was about twelve, turning in some of his finest work ever here. Some of the other players include ex-Smithereen Dennis Diken on drums, Doug Larcey from House of Usher on lead guitar, les Chauds Lapins’ string section of Garo Yellin on cello and Claudia Chopek on violin, Mark Sidgwick on bass and Will Scott drummer Wylie Wirth on percussion, among others. Needing some twelve-string guitar, they went out and got Roger McGuinn. For some particularly intense lead guitar work, Marty Willson-Piper from the Church. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Rogers, a British expat, has a voice that reminds a lot of the Move’s Carl Wayne, but more refined. The cd opens auspiciously with its title track, which works equally well as harrowing survivor’s story (Rogers narrowly survived a nasty accident in the New York City subway) and cautionary tale. The second track, Blind Man’s Blue, is pure Merseybeat soul, like what the Traveling Wilburys might have done had they actually put a little effort into their songwriting. Like other tracks here, the poignant piano ballad Far Reflection is a dead ringer for an early Jeff Lynne hit with its vivid strings. Of the other tracks, I Hear This Place Is Haunted could be one of those Jeff Lynne Chuck Berry imitations that seemingly made it onto every single ELO album. The country arrangement for the upbeat, bouncy It Took Years and Years and Years features both McGuinn on banjo as well as the Lonesome Billys’ Jonathan Gregg providing some rustic-tinged steel playing. 

Right about here, the cd starts to sound less restrained, more 60s: The Last to Leave the Party has the same type of self-effacing, tongue-in-cheek humor – and same kind of string arrangement – as a classic Move hit circa Night of Fear. Graveyard Voices is a nod to 60s psychedelia, with a feast of characteristically incisive, reverb-and-wah-wah guitar from Willson-Piper. The album concludes ambitiously with What Happened to Manfred, What Happened to Jane, a sprawling epic that succeeds not because of its storyline – when the narrator decides that his long-lost love really wasn’t the right one anyway, it’s no surprise – but as a triumph of multistylistic excellence. Over the course of seventeen-plus minutes, Rogers and Usher run their bandmates through a memorably tuneful suite of songs beginning with a pensive, Roy Wood-inflected piano ballad, and (in order): a big Bowiesque glam-rocker; a bouncy, comedic, artsy pop song like late-60s Moody Blues; a rueful early 70s style pop hit that could be ELO; a Buddy Hollyesque rockabilly raveup; more piano-based 70s art-rock; a Beatlesque, early 60s style pop hit; a fiery, Richard Thompson-ish chromatic rock song featuring some deliciously evil lead guitar from Pete Kennedy, and a reprise of the opening theme, guitar and organ smoothing out the melody. And an ending that definitely comes as a surprise, for what it’s worth. Fans of classic, purist songwriting will devour this cd: if this had existed thirty years ago, Edward Rogers would have ruled the Billboard charts. You can bet it’ll make it to a whole lot of “best-of-2008” lists at the end of the year. Do expats qualify for the Mercury Prize?