Dazzle Ships is one of British pop's more notorious flops. It was the follow-up to a major hit album but cut OMD's audience by 90%. It was a mix of new songs, reworked B-Sides, and "found sound" experiments, which promised to mix "ABBA and Stockhausen." It was named after wartime camouflage boats. It was appallingly reviewed. In fact I don't think you could design a record more ripe for revisionism: It's got a strong backstory, it's as ambitious as it is catchy and it even has a gorgeous Peter Saville sleeve. Luckily, you don't need a contrarian streak to love it.
The 25 years between release and this reissue have done Dazzle Ships the world of good: The weaknesses of 1983 don't seem that way today. Nobody now cares how nerdily singer Andy McCluskey dressed or how gawkily he danced, and while his bare-nerved sea lion yelp was a liability in an era of chilly reserve it sounds messily, modishly emotional now. More importantly, Dazzle Ships seems a lot less radical than it did on release: The Kraftwerk records and musique concrète it obviously borrowed from have been more fully absorbed into pop music. You'll have heard uglier noises than the title track's mechanical grindings and foghorn blurts, and stranger constructions than the layered robot voices on "ABC Auto-Industry". Those songs won't sound like clumsy shock-tactics to a new listener, just more parts in the album's sad, effective synth-pop collage.
Dazzle Ships was born out of writer's block, and given the record's jumbled origins it's dangerous to claim too much thematic consistency. But the various interludes-- as well as the ships and robots, there are radio callsigns and sampled speaking clocks-- are crucial in building coherence and the transitions from experiment to song are well-handled. Those servile robot voices sound a lot more sinister alongside the grinning scissor-dance that opens the record's hookiest track, "Genetic Engineering". When the clocks on "Time Zones" unify and their final bleeps announce mournful closer "Of All the Things We've Made", it's like McCluskey has stepped outside history for a moment, to deliver a gloomy summing-up.
The passing of time has had an impact on Dazzle Ships' content as well as its style. This isn't a concept album so much as an album made by a concept band-- all of OMD's early work digs into ideas about history and technology, and Dazzle Ships is no exception. But time has a tendency to turn technology into history. As "This Is Helena" clatters perkily along a voice chirps "This is Helena! Music for your tape recorder!" The first CD players went on sale six months before this album: Some of the reissue's buyers won't even have seen a tape recorder. "This Is Helena" now sounds as archaic as "Telegraph"'s rousing celebration of the dawn of a mass communication age. Similarly, Dazzle Ships used to juxtapose World War imagery with the contemporary ideological struggle between communism and capitalism: now both are historical, and the sorrow in a song like "International" is the sadness of old sepia photographs.
Dazzle Ships' reference points span the 20th century, and the record works today as a time-capsule farewell to it. Even the poppiest songs sound endearingly old-fashioned and awkward, more clockwork than digital, and the remaster is faithful to this machine-age charm. The extra tracks don't add much-- they're B-Sides to B-Sides, after all, with the extended "Genetic Engineering" 12" the only standout. But history has done its own remix job on Dazzle Ships, and the result is a richer, more unified album than anyone in 1983 could have imagined.
