release date: Jun. 17, 1985
format: digital / cd (40th Anniversary) (2025 remaster)
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,66]
producer: Stephen Hague
label: Virgin Records - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 1. "So in Love" (4,5 / 5) - 2. "Secret" - 3. "Bloc Bloc Bloc" (4 / 5) (official video) - 5. "Crush" - 6. "88 Seconds in Greensboro" - 8. "La femme accident" - 9. "Hold You"
6th studio album by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The album starts off with three great synthpop tracks but then sort of fades out. It's a kind of a strange album as it both signals the polished mainstream pop tunes they had focused on with Junk Culture (Apr. 1984) but then it also contains more daring compositions and elements, which in a way points to the band's eternal dilemma: being both pure pop and art pop, and how they were mostly unable to choose from these two positions.
I played the album a lot for a shorter period of time, then quickly grew tired of it, concluding it was too slick, too polished, and I couldn't hear it throughout, although, I found that it was definitely bettering the predecessor, which I found a surprising low-point.
Returning to the album two decades later, I find it more than decent, though. It contains several great tracks but also, and which is why I tired of it in the first place: it contains a number of evident fillers that in a way drag the whole album down. Some have called OMD a singles band, and I fully do understand that term when referring to OMD 'cause they have made some truly great individual songs, even on mediocre albums, but it really becomes valid when you begin to compare individual compositions on a particular album. On Dazzle Ships people tend to focus on one song as that album's strength, which it really isn't, but on this one and their later albums the band present one or two tracks released as singles that obviously should promote the album - a bit in the way artist worked in the 60s and 70s - only with OMD the remaining tracks would be something entirely different.
Anyway, without being great I think this is better than its reputation.
[ allmusic.com 2 / 5 stars ]
