vinylfanatics.com

**10cc - The Original Soundtrack ★★★★☆**

By 1975, 10cc had already proven themselves masters of the pop laboratory, concocting hit singles with the precision of musical chemists and the playfulness of schoolboys let loose in Abbey Road. But with their third album, The Original Soundtrack, Graham Gouldman, Eric Stewart, Kevin Godley, and Lol Creme delivered something altogether more ambitious – a sprawling, schizophrenic masterpiece that would inadvertently serve as their creative peak and the beginning of their end.

The Manchester quartet had emerged from the ashes of various Merseybeat hopefuls and the bubblegum factory of Kasenetz-Katz, where they'd anonymously crafted hits for others before striking gold themselves with "Donna" and "Rubber Bullets." Their previous albums had showcased their knack for immaculate three-minute pop confections, but The Original Soundtrack found them stretching out, experimenting with longer forms, and indulging every whimsical tangent their collective imagination could conjure.

The album's pièce de résistance remains "I'm Not In Love," a track so deceptively simple yet technically revolutionary that it still sounds like it beamed down from another planet. What began as Stewart's throwaway chord sequence was transformed into a six-minute opus of layered vocals – no synthesizers, just the human voice multiplied into infinity, creating an otherworldly wash of sound that predated ambient music by years. The whispered "Big boys don't cry" from receptionist Kathy Redfern adds an unsettling intimacy to what is, essentially, a song about emotional cowardice dressed up as the most romantic ballad ever recorded. It's a contradiction that perfectly encapsulates 10cc's genius – they could make the cynical sound sublime.

But to focus solely on their biggest hit would be to miss the album's delirious variety. "Une Nuit A Paris" unfolds like a three-part musical fever dream, segueing from cabaret pastiche through Gallic accordion-pop to a closing section that sounds like Kraftwerk jamming with Maurice Chevalier. It's the kind of ambitious suite that prog bands attempted with hammers when 10cc wielded scalpels, demonstrating that conceptual music didn't need to abandon melody or humor.

The album's genre-hopping continues with "Art For Art's Sake," a prescient commentary on commercialism wrapped in irresistible glam-rock stomp, and "Life Is A Minestrone," which somehow makes a song about soup both profound and utterly ridiculous. The latter track exemplifies 10cc's ability to find poetry in the mundane – only they could craft an existential crisis from Italian cuisine and make it stick.

Musically, The Original Soundtrack sits at the intersection of art-rock ambition and pop accessibility, predating the new wave movement's similar balancing act by several years. The production, handled by the band themselves, remains startlingly modern – every whisper, guitar jangle, and vocal harmony sits perfectly in the mix, creating a sonic landscape that rewards both casual listening and deep analysis.

The album's success, however, contained the seeds of the band's dissolution. The painstaking process of creating "I'm Not In Love" – with its 256 vocal overdubs and obsessive attention to detail – highlighted the growing divide between Godley and Creme's experimental inclinations and Gouldman and Stewart's pop sensibilities. Within two years, the band would split, with Godley & Creme pursuing increasingly avant-garde territory while the remaining duo kept the 10cc name for more commercially-minded ventures.

Today, The Original Soundtrack stands as a monument to what happens when supreme technical ability meets unbridled creativity and unlimited studio time. It's an album that influenced everyone from Radiohead to the Pet Shop Boys, proving that intelligence and experimentation need not be the enemy of emotional impact. In an era when bands are often forced to choose between credibility and commercial success, 10cc's third album remains a masterclass in having your cake and eating it too.

The Original Soundtrack captures a band at their absolute peak – four musicians so in sync they could make the absurd sound inevitable, the complex feel effortless, and the cynical transform into something approaching transcendence. It's pop music for people who think too much, and thinking music for people who just want to feel something. Nearly five decades on, it still sounds like the future.