It's not the sounds that are disjointed, incongruent and senseless, it's the world. On Dazzle Ships, dismayed idealists struggle to make sense of it all - or at least bring it to the forefront of the listening mind. Predating U2's equally dystopic, less reckless and more profitable Zooropa by a decade, it is as relevant today as it was in 1983.
The Dazzle Ships montage, a carefully composed collection of bangs, echoes, beeps and voices, dares to explore the chilling question: What does impending death sound like?
The multilingual automated speaking clocks on Time Zones relentlessly count down to . . . something.
As in life, moments of order, and even beauty, punctuate the album, such as in Genetic Engineering, Telegraph and Romance of the Telescope.
As a soundtrack to world disorder, the album met with commercial disaster. Still, Dazzle Ships remains among the most maligned albums ever to get it right.
June 6, 2007 |  | love love love this record |  |
there are plenty of haters out there, but they hate most everyone's best/ most experimental records. this record is up there with all the greatest albums of all time. OMD transcend time with dazzle ships. concept is gorgeous, experimentaion is gorgeous, songwriting is gorgeous, art work is gorgeous. all around perfect album.
March 21, 2007I owned the original vinyl version of this album. While it contains some of OMD's best songs (Telegraph, Of All the Things we've Made, Genetic Engineering, International) and the ok song Silent Running, it also contains some of their worst. The vocals in Radio Waves are painful to listen to and as for the title track Dazzle Ships then you have to wonder "what were they thinking". The other tracks are just plain filler tracks and I can't seem to figure out why they thought they were worthy of inclussion. Time Zones is just overlayed recordings of speaking clocks from around the world and Radio Prague is just sound bites from Radio Prague Radio Station (surprisingly enough). Their best album by a long long way, a must have, is the originally titled "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark". This is the album where OMD started to trade off uniqueness for popularity and the later albums just got more and more pop trashy.
September 7, 2006You decide that the two best songs on this album, the only two good songs, are Romance of the Telescope and Of All the Things We've Made. Then you look at the liner notes and, surprise, these two songs are from 1981, not 1983, as the rest of the album is. Clearly these must have been leftover songs from Architecture and Morality, which was OMD's BEST album. Everything from here on was stunningly weak.
Having a hit single wrecked a few bands from this era-Simple Minds, Modern English, OMD. Maybe they made a few extra dollars but at what cost?
July 30, 2006| | | Dazzle Ships is brilliant and lovely | |
I disagree with those of you who say this album is crap. For a synth-poppy band to go THIS FAR off the deep end, in the 80s, was brave and adventurous. They merge Kraftwerk-like obsession with Shortwave Radio with their traditional beautiful romantic songs, for a brilliantly jarring combination. It's definitely noisier and grittier than anything other new romantics were recording, but retains an edge into the musique concrete direction..... I loved this album when it was released, and still love it now. I personally think it was the LAST good album OMD released......
December 26, 2005More reviews at Amazon.com ...
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