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> 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.
― grimly fiendish, Thursday, 26 August 2004 09:40 (nineteen years ago) link
five years pass...
"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.
― Tied Up In Geir (Geir Hongro), Wednesday, 17 March 2010 01:27 (fourteen years ago) link