Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Dazzle Ships

Even though Dazzleship flopped as a mainstream album, I still love it. Only the Dazzleship suite is the track I have to skip each time. The more poppy songs on here are extremely underrated. Genetic Engineering and Telegraph are two classic OMD songs. I also love the avantgarde experiments on here. Time Zones is a great experiment, layering different talking clocks from around the world is a great, yet very unobvious idea. However, I think this album did kill OMD, who probably paid too much attention to it's commercial success. Crush and Junk Culture are terrible compared to Architecture & Morality and perhaps even Dazzleships. Or, it may be the new digital technology taking over the studio.

What have these guys done?! Amazing stuff from the early eighties. The sounds, the moods- just a standout, timeless record. The synth stabs after the chorus of Radio Waves- stunning, spine tingling synth-pop joy. Telegraph, Time Zones and the tear-jerking final track - all classics.

listening to dazzle ships, i can see why OMD sold out and went the full-on new romantic route - this album is very ambitious, not entirely successful and probably cost their a&r guy his job.

flush with the critical and commercial success of architecture and morality, OMD followed up with this vaguely conceptual album about modern love, life and the cold war, grabbing every sound source that their disposal - shortwave transmissions, speak and spell, and the best synths money could buy - and assimilating every music style they could listen to. dazzle ships is packed with daring ideas and clever intertextualities, but it's a little short on good songs.

still, when they're on, as on "abc auto-industry", the joy divisionesque "silent running" and "of all the things we've made", OMD display uncanny talents for extending the limits of pop songcraft, as radiohead would nearly 15 years later, with ok computer.

it makes sense that architecture and morality would be considered OMD's best album, but dazzle ships, which is very much of its time (you've heard those synth presets way too many times) and well ahead of it, will always be their underrated, flawed masterpiece. worth revisiting.