Release type:What's this?
studio album
First released:
1983

Overview Edit

Dazzle Ships is the fourth album by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), released in 1983.

The title and cover art (designed by Peter Saville) alluded to a painting by Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth based on dazzle camouflage. The album was released on LP, compact cassette and compact disc, with distinct artwork.

The album was the follow-up release to the band's hugely successful Architecture & Morality. In contrast with its celebrated predecessor, Dazzle Ships met with a degree of critical and commercial hostility, due to the inaccessible nature of half of the material it contained, particularly musique concrète sound collages, utilising shortwave radio recordings to explore Cold War and Eastern Bloc themes (the odd numbered tracks).

However the album did also contain six conventional pop songs (the even numbered tracks and track 9), 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, leaving only four new "real" songs on this album, one of them, "Radio Waves", being a new version of a song from previous Humphreys & McCluskey's pre-OMD band, The Id. Two singles were released from it, "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 album was co-produced with Rhett Davies, who was best known for his work on lusher-sounding albums by the reformed Roxy Music.

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, in order 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.

On a remastered compact disc with bonus tracks was released, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the album. The critical hostility towards the album had cooled and the reissue of Dazzle Ships received positive reviews from Pitchfork Media, Popmatters and The A.V. Club, among others.

The Overview appearing in this section is attributed to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_Ships_(album). Portions of this Overview may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Additional terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.

This particular version Edit

Record label:
unknown
Catalog number:
unknown
Release dates:
  • Apr 15 2008

Genres

Electronic, Electronica, Synthpop. Vote on Genres

Track listing Edit

Credits Edit

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Other versions Edit

Dazzle Ships 12 tracks format: 1 x CD
record label: Virgin Records US
catalog number: 86090
release dates: 1983 in United Kingdom
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Dazzle Ships 12 tracks format: 1 x CD
record label: Virgin Records US
catalog number: 86090
release dates: Jun 29 1992
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