8/8/2023 0 Comments Dazzle ships album![]() ![]() Though the commercial failure of the album scared the band into making straightforward electropop, and although they've successfully continued with that formula into the present day, this album is a fascinating artistic triumph that combines weird and wonderful. The album is noted for it's experimental content, particularly musique concrte sound. The follow-up album to OMD's commercially successful Architecture & Morality (1981), Dazzle Ships marked a departure in sound for the group. ![]() Then again, you can see why OMD thought they might get away. Dazzle Ships is the fourth studio album by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), originally released in 1983. ‘Genetic Engineering’ was the first single from Dazzle Ships. Though not as good as its predecessor, “Dazzle Ships” marks the peak of OMD’s cerebral nerdiness and the dazzling power of electronic music. Dazzle Ships is an album that gets under a certain kind of listener’s skin if you’re willing to go with it, its chilly, idiosyncratic sound-world can envelop you but you’d have to call it an acquired taste. “Dazzle Ships” closes with “Of All the Things We Made,” which stands apart from the rest as the most mesmerizing, beautiful song of OMD’s career. These short, oddball songs have no lyrics apart from disjointed radio splicings and emotionless repetition. Finally, songs like “Time Zones,” “ABC Auto Industry,” and the opener, “Radio Prague,” drop pretense entirely. Others, like “International” and “Silent Running,” mask their quirks behind sweeping electronic soundwaves. Even the two singles on the album, “Genetic Engineering” and “Telegraph,” deal obsessively with these themes despite almost sounding like normal songs. Atmospheric Clinical Complex Detached Difficult Gloomy Melancholy Ominous Passionate Somber Sophisticated Tense/Anxious Witty Yearning. The album uses mechanical atmospherics and forays into dated technology to give the album a distinctly anachronistic, Communist-Bloc-feel. Unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to listen to it. Viewed as the ultimate commercial suicide, “Dazzle Ships” experimented with Cold War themes by creating cold, robotic music that was more metronomic than melodic. The groundbreaking synth-pop band lost their momentum from their previous release, “Architecture and Morality,” an album that rightfully gave them commercial and critical success. It’s rare that an artist loses 90% of its audience with one album, but that’s exactly what happened when OMD released “Dazzle Ships” in 1983. ![]()
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