Dazzle Ships (album)

Dazzle Ships (album)

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 painting, Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, is in the collection of the National Art Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Canada. 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 critical hostility towards the album had cooled by the 3 March 2008 (2008-03-03) release of a remastered compact disc with bonus tracks, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the album, which received positive reviews from the BBC, Record Collector, Pitchfork Media, Popmatters and The A.V. Club, among others. Ned Raggett of AllMusic, in a positive review, opined that the album was an influence on the work of Radiohead.

The track "Genetic Engineering" is an overt homage to Kraftwerk, with the vocal arrangement drawing heavily on the structure employed on their track "Computer World".

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.

However the album did also contain six conventional pop songs, 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.