The Original Soundtrack (1975)

10cc is a strange beast that came lurching out of the swamps of '70s pop and art-rock, with some roots even in the '60s so-called British Invasion. Perhaps too tuneful (and, frankly, commercial) to be considered prog they nonetheless flit determinedly around the edges of it, showing off their smarts and their chops every chance they get, particularly on the eight-minute suite that opens the album, "Une Nuit a Paris," which Wikipedia tells me was a direct influence on both Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Don't forget the grain of salt. Me, well, in general I am more often put in mind of a British comedy novelty act such as the Bonzo Dog Band or even Monty Python—there's a lot of broad humor larded all through this, and as the title desperately wants to imply it probably wouldn't be hard fitting visuals to most of it either. How it came into my life I can't remember—I think a friend liked it, and I liked the hit "I'm Not in Love" (here in all its six-minute glory), and then I found it in a cutout bin. Something like that. I've never counted it a huge favorite but it's rife with melody, cutesy mannerism, and small-bore winning moments. "I'm Not in Love" happens to be the thing here that's not like the others, but it's a big beautiful mellotron boat and a pleasure to experience floating by, I suppose also because of some memories of its times that have become attached. Drat, the personal element again. And so on and so forth: "Une Nuit a Paris" gets its Ratatouille/Triplets of Belleville Parisian underclass on a long time before the cartoons came along. "The Second Sitting for the Last Supper" and "Life Is a Minestrone" work ham-handed jokes in sparkling pop and/or rockin' settings. After "I'm Not in Love" (which, you should know, you really owe it to yourself to have around, though you can probably still count on the radio to feed it to you on a regular basis), my favorite here has always been the album closer "The Film of My Love," a five-minute piece of bloated puffery that works like a piece of overly rich pastry, luscious, irresistible, monotonous, bursting with comic affect, high concept, a mocking love song that plays effectively on the emotions even as it resorts to one movie pun after the next, "forever and ever and ever ... Over and over and over (over and over and over)." I won't make you wonder—here's what it sounds like.