Dazzle Ships

Following the unexpected (and according to the liner notes of this album's 25th anniversary expanded reissue, not entirely welcome) commercial success of 1981's Architecture and Morality, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark chose to follow up that chart-friendly release with the deliberately abrasive, experimental Dazzle Ships. Named for (and with a sleeve mimicking) the hard-edged modernist camouflage that protected British warships in World War I, the album is as stark but oddly beautiful as its inspiration. Fully half of the album's tracks aren't conventional pop songs, but sound collages built on shortwave radio broadcasts, telephone time recordings and other unconventional sources. OMD had experimented with non-musical sounds before -- Organisation's "Stanlow" incorporated field recordings of a local oil refinery--but never so pervasively or to such fascinating effect. Though the singles "Genetic Engineering" and "Telegraph" were playful, sunny synth-pop, a pervasive melancholy suffuses the album as a whole. Written and recorded during and after the 1982 Falklands War, the album never directly addresses the conflict, but songs like the impassioned centerpiece "International" and the hypnotic, glumly beautiful closer "Of All the Things We've Made" are nonetheless charged with the sense of life during wartime. At the time received with critical confusion and poor sales, Dazzle Ships has since revealed itself as one of OMD's most artistically successful albums. Although the group clearly grew more comfortable with the idea of hit records, nothing they did after this had anywhere near the emotional impact.