The Best OMD album?

It's also my favourite...

This is Helena, your MC today..

"A&M", great songs from start to finish, sounds lovely and pastoral, includes superb title track. "Dazzle ships", weird but still wonderful, pop tunes and experiment too, includes superb "Genetic engineering". "Organisation", almost great songs from end to end, best post "Closer" album ever, includes 3rd fave song of all time "Statues".

what, "almost"? it's OK. but i don't think it's a patch on "i betray my friends". one bizarre summer, when i was 15, i listened to that song and nothing else for two weeks.

"the romance of the telescope" is exquisite, but the version on dazzle ships (ie the "finished" one) is slightly superior. and "4-neu" ... aah, there's a tragic and embarrassing story attached to me and that song ... oh, i need to go to a meeting now. that's a shame, i'll probably never get to tell it :)

This is the room
This is the wall
This is the body
I’ve been hoping for
These are the words
I’ve been longing just to say

So this is my goal
The aim of my life
This is the feeling
They warned me about

Oh my God,
What have I done this time
Oh my god,
What have I done his time

http://www.omd.uk.com/

they should reissue the *vinyl*. one of saville's finest hours. the way the dots on the map fill in as you insert the inner sleeve makes me weep with joy.

One of their best, actually!

I found this for $2! It's marvellous!

I never thought that I would see a discussion of OMD on ILM. Didn't seem cool enough somehow.

it took me a long time to "come out" as an OMD fan. i remember playing architecture and morality to a university friend (favourite band: husker du) who was blown away ... but refused to believe that this cheesy little synthpop band was actually so goddamn powerful.

had they quit (as they said they would) after a&m or dazzle ships, they'd be feted now as pioneers. dazzle ships, after all, is probably the single most daring and unusual album by a mainstream pop band of the 1980s. but they got greedy, they got bloated, they got boring. i mean: trumpets! recording on montserrat! good god.

mind you, the other problem ... they did look like complete muppets. the geek chic thing only really began to work circa dazzle ships: perhaps because the jerky, fragmented music worked well with their, er, jerky image. compare and contrast with the human league, who'd also blanded out badly by the mid-80s: at least they had an image to keep them afloat.

"Even in America, they understand the value of religion."

"Telegraph (Manor Version)" on the expanded Dazzle Ships is incroyable: evidently recorded at the same time as Architecture & Morality, it has a significantly different lyric, taking the religious angle quite a lot further than in the Dazzle Ships album version.

It's one of those days when I think OMD is the best band in the world.

I would rep for "Organisation" here. I love "Architecture and Morality" as well, but some of the tracks are still a bit too... Well... pointing towards "Dazzle Ships", maybe.. Whereas "Organisation" is a wonderful synthpop album all the way through, and it is almost incredible that no other single than "Enola Gay" was ever released from it.

dazzle ships, after all, is probably the single most daring and unusual album by a mainstream pop band of the 1980s

http://bbblog.ubisonic.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/talk_talk-spirit_of_eden.jpg

And both largely failed.......