omd - dazzle ships

Riding a wave of popularity after the huge success of Architecture And Morality and the "Joan Of Arc" singles, OMD went back into the studio with a big ol' budget and plenty of time - but they were somewhat short of ideas. Dazzle Ships was the last blast of experimentalism from OMD for some time but what a blast it is!

I mean, how on earth did they get away with this record? Just what were they thinking? 

 

I remember reading that Andy McCluskey described it as OMD wanting to mix the pop sensibilities of ABBA with the avant garde experiments of Stockhausen. I guess they sort of achieved that with Dazzle Ships, but it begs the question WHY on earth would anyone want to mix ABBA with Stockhausen?

 

Today people seem to love Dazzle Ships. But in 1983 OMD got slated for it. After the increasing success of the first three albums, their label was expecting a smasheroonie poptastic hit of an album. So was the Great British Public. Then we got Dazzle Ships and OMD lost a lot of their audience, and the label lost a lot of money.

 

It's a shame, though understandable, that OMD then retreated from this experimental approach so completely and became a fairly anodyne pop band for the rest of the 80s. I jumped ship at this point - not because I didn't like Dazzle Ships, (I did, but not as much as Architecture… or Organisation) but I got fed up with OMD because the next record wasn't Dazzle Ships or Architecture… it became too poppy and didn't interest me.

 

For a long time I tended to avoid Dazzle Ships as a complete album. I really liked the 'proper' songs a lot, but the time zone announcements and all that seemed too self consciously a copy of the similar interludes on Kraftwerk's Radioactivity and they could get a bit irritating. But in more recent times I enjoy the whole album, partly because it has all these funny little interludes. It's clearly a little bonkers, the sound of a band floundering and struggling with their sense of direction. The ABBA meets Stockhausen tag line smacks slightly of desperation, as if Andy had to somehow justify the weird mish-mash he'd created and so came up with what he thought was a terribly clever description. It's very much of it's time too - the limits of the technology are painfully exposed occasionally, but the whole album has a pleasingly Cold War feel to it, clinical, stark and forbidding at times, but with flashes of sheer joy and silliness too. But despite the schizophrenic nature of the record, there's a clear sense of a band pushing boundaries, perhaps too far sometimes, a band going beyond their limits, but a band having a whale of a time doing it.

 

"This Is Helena" for example, is tremendously good fun, exuberant and uplifting in a way that you wouldn't imagine a synth pop band could be. "Genetic Engineering" is a noisy, shouty pop song about a very emotive subject, but it's astonishingly catchy. The two leftovers from the Architecture sessions, "Romance Of The Telescope" and "Of All The Things We've Made", have a weary grandeur about them which is truly impressive. "Of All The Things..." has an especially final feel to it, and is a fitting closer to this period of OMD.