Dazzle Ships (album)

Album information

Frontman Andy McCluskey recalled: "We wanted to be ABBA and Stockhausen. The machinery, bones and humanity were juxtaposed." However, the album did also contain six conventional pop songs, both up-tempo numbers and ballads. Two of them, "The Romance of the Telescope" and "Of All the Things We've Made" were remixed versions of songs previously issued on B-sides to earlier singles (on the "Joan of Arc" single, "The Romance of the Telescope" was specifically described as "unfinished"). "Radio Waves" was a new version of a song from McCluskey and Paul Humphreys's pre-OMD band, The Id. Two singles were released from the album, "Genetic Engineering" and "Telegraph", which achieved moderate chart success in the United Kingdom and on American rock and college radio. Both were also released as 7" vinyl picture discs.

The band's former record company, the independent Dindisc label, had recently ceased trading, and so the band's contract was transferred to DinDisc's parent company, Virgin Records. However, to maintain the image of being signed to an "indie" label, the record sleeve purported that the album was released by the fictitious "Telegraph" label. The album was released on LP, compact cassette and compact disc.

The "Radio Prague" track is the actual interval signal of the Czechoslovak Radio foreign service, including the time signal and station ID spoken in Czech. "Time Zones" is a montage of various speaking clocks from around the world. Neither "Radio Prague" nor "Time Zones" carry any writing credit at all, with OMD being credited only for arranging the tracks. The "This Is Helena", "ABC Auto-Industry" and "International" tracks also include parts of some broadcasts recorded off-air (a presenter introducing herself, economic bulletin and news, respectively). The track "Genetic Engineering" is an overt homage to Kraftwerk, with the vocal arrangement drawing heavily on the structure employed on their track "Computer World".

The cover painting, Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, is in the collection of the National Art Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Canada.

Reception and legacy

Critics were bewildered by the experimental Dazzle Ships. John Shearlaw in Record Mirror cautioned: "To describe the LP as difficult and fractured is an understatement." In the Leader-Post, Michael Lawson wrote: "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark strains so hard to be topical on their fourth album, Dazzle Ships, that they ultimately find themselves mired in obliqueness... too much attention [is] given to soundtrack-like effects that only clutter what decent electropop baubles there are here – and there is indeed some good, if limited, work." Sounds critic Chris Burkham referred to "a continual start-stop effect as songs rub themselves up the wrong way", while John Gill in Time Out slammed Dazzle Ships as "redundant avant-garde trickery".

Bob Stanley in The Guardian commented on its initial lack of success: "[The album] contained no obvious hits and soundtracked the cold war at its coldest. No one bought it, mind you, so Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's Dazzle Ships came to be viewed as a heroic failure – the ultimate commercial suicide... [it] entered the charts at No 5, then dropped like a stone."

Critical opinion of Dazzle Ships has since shifted to a more favourable stance, with the record garnering positive retrospective appraisals from Record Collector, PopMatters, The A.V. Club, Q and The Quietus, among others. Ned Raggett in AllMusic noted the album's "alien feeling" and described it as "dazzling indeed"; he and colleague David Jeffries hailed the record as a "masterpiece"—an opinion echoed by numerous critics. Pitchfork journalist Tom Ewing wrote: "Luckily, you don't need a contrarian streak to love it... history has done its own remix job on Dazzle Ships, and the result is a richer, more unified album than anyone in 1983 could have imagined." Gareth Ware in DIY said: "Like a strange piece of modernist architecture, it's a collection of awkward, jagged polygons which come together to form a cohesive mass at the last possible moment... [Dazzle Ships] demands attention."

Reflecting on the record in 2008, McCluskey said: "The album that almost completely killed our career seems to have become a work of dysfunctional genius... it's taken Paul [Humphreys] 25 years to forgive me for Dazzle Ships. But some people always hold it up as what we were all about, why they thought we were great." That same year, John Bergstrom in PopMatters wrote: "It stands as one of the most unorthodox releases ever by a major pop artist... Today, Dazzle Ships is rightly considered a lost classic." It was the focus of the August 2007 instalment of Mojo magazine's "Buried Treasure" feature, which spotlighted a "wrongly forgotten" record. Dazzle Ships was listed in Slicing Up Eyeballs' "Best of the '80s" in June 2013, being ranked as one of the top 25 releases of 1983 based on almost 32,000 reader votes. The record has also been reintroduced to the public via album listings in publications like PopMatters, The A.V. Club, and Q magazine, who gave it a favourable reappraisal in a their "10 Great Old-School Electronic Albums" feature. The record is a favourite among OMD listeners, and has had a resurgence in popularity in recent years. Stuart Huggett in The Quietus, while noting that Dazzle Ships has achieved cult status and features some of the band's strongest work, suggested that it "is likely to remain too off the wall ever to permanently join the general public's Classic Albums canon".

Influence

Dazzle Ships has been highly influential on other artists. Indie pop group Saint Etienne have referred to the album as a major influence, particularly on their 1991 record, Foxbase Alpha. Chris Walla of alternative rock band Death Cab for Cutie called Dazzle Ships "a big chunk of the inspiration" for his group's 2011 release, Codes and Keys. He described Dazzle Ships as the record that "everyone points to as [OMD's] magnum opus", adding: "It's really a gorgeous album. It's daring and it's weird and it leans a lot on the paranoia of the Cold War." Experimental rock band Radiohead are fans of Dazzle Ships; multiple critics have pointed to "Genetic Engineering" as an inspiration for their OK Computer track, "Fitter Happier". Comparisons have been drawn to Radiohead's Kid A as well. In addition to these artists, numerous dance acts are aficionados of Dazzle Ships.

Dazzle Ships has also been championed by producer Mark Ronson, and indie rock musician Telekinesis, who has described the album as "genius". Ronson, to whom Dazzle Ships was recommended by singer Amanda "MNDR" Warner, said of the record: "I was just completely floored. It's so weird when you hear something that's like 30 years old that immediately you're just like, 'I've been robbed, I could have been listening to this for the past 30 years'. It's just so elegant but a bit lo-fi at the same time." Musician and public speaker Terre Thaemlitz has said that she owns five different pressings of the album.

Indie rock band Eggs released a cover of "Genetic Engineering" as a single in 1994. Rapper Kid Cudi sampled "ABC Auto-Industry" on his 2009 track, "Simple As...".

Track listing

The "Manor Version" of "Telegraph" was recorded at the same time as Architecture & Morality. "Swiss Radio International" was dropped from the album at the last minute. Like "Radio Prague", it contains the call sign for a radio station and was once referred to as "The Ice Cream Song" by drummer Mal Holmes due to its similarity to the melodies played by ice cream vans.

Singles

"Genetic Engineering"

1. "Genetic Engineering" – 3:37
2. "4-Neu" – 3:33

1. "Genetic Engineering" (312mm version) – 5:18
2. "4-Neu" – 3:33

The punning title of "4-Neu" was a dedication to the influential "krautrock" band Neu!. "312mm" is approximately twelve inches (304.8mm).

"Telegraph"

1. "Telegraph" – 2:57
2. "66 and Fading" – 6:40

1. "Telegraph" (extended version) – 5:53
2. "66 and Fading" – 6:30

Personnel

Production details

Instruments

In terms of instrumentation, Dazzle Ships saw the band begin to explore digital sampling keyboards (the E-mu Emulator) in addition to their continued use of analogue synthesizers and the Mellotron.

List of used instruments: