From the late 1970s onward, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were as much reacting to the sonic possibilities made available by technology as they were translating them, first as increasingly popular hit-makers at home and Europe, then with a clutch of memorable American singles. English Electric, the British new wave band's second full length since the reformation of the classic 1980s lineup in 2006, neither escapes from the quartet's past nor fully aims to. Afterall, they had Peter Saville do their cover art, just has he did for their debut 33 years ago.
In that regard, much of English Electric inititally seems like a recapitulation. The first full song on the album, “Metroland”, starts out aping the opening melody and sonics of Kraftwerk’s “Europe Endless”, then goes as far as to include a riff on the wordless chorale vocals, too. But the punching beat of the song feels more post-industrial, suggesting the relentless pulse underlying later groups like VNV Nation or Apoptygma Berzerk. That, and frontman Andy McCluskey's immediately recognizable singing, above all else, provides the melodic focus as well as the elegant, yearning tone, here and throughout.
As the album title indicates clearly enough, it's a reflective English futurism, perhaps, in the same way that a group like Pink Floyd often provided a certain rainy day psychedelia that could have only derived from Great Britain and nowhere else. That English Electric itself was the name of a noted UK train and aerospace manufacturing firm from the 20th Century further underscores that sense of a specifically grounded and gone past, no less so than Kraftwerk had its own earlier obsessions with a German and Middle European technology already confronting an obsolescence.
Yet for all the backward glancing, there's a tension between the past and a possible way forward. “Kissing the Machine”, perhaps one of the clearest moments of a returned past, is a reworking of a song McCluskey did with Kraftwerk veteran Karl Bartos two decades back for the latter’s Elektric Music project. Meanwhile, McCluskey has noted in a recent interview that “Decimal” is meant to capture a feeling from Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, while the song “Helen of Troy” in its stately passion, sweet hookiness, and the title itself, captures the feeling of “Joan of Arc” and “Maid of Orleans”.
If there's something key, though, it's that all of this doesn't truly feel like their past redone in exactly the same way-- polished and punchier, not quite as nervously trebly, able to suggest the aggressiveness of EBM on the arrangement of something like “Our System” but not replicating it. In that regard the airport PA-styled announcement of “The future that you anticipated has been cancelled” from the opening “Please Remain Seated” turns out to be more apt than might be guessed -- it’s neither the tentative beginnings nor the top 40 pomp, but something else again.
This balancing of tensions may be the secret of English Electric’s overall appeal. If a band like Radiohead transformed the technological perceptions and considered unease of OMD’s still astonishing early 80s masterpiece Dazzle Ships into their own fractured electronic nightmares, OMD are secure enough in their own sound and vision to create a “Fitter Happier” kissing cousin in the glitch-tinged and robotic-voiced “Atomic Ranch” without sounding a mere borrowing back. “The Future Will Be Silent" crackles with suggestions of bass drops and intrusive noise, fractures and slows and weaves among a cascade of sound. “The future was not supposed to be like this,” a treated voice repeats at several points, but OMD continue to stake out their retrofuturism on their terms, a roots jam for a generation raised on wires.
