Unfair review of "Dazzle Ships"

If I’m being honest, I’ve never been a fan of 1980’s synthpop. The era of 80’s synthpop was a sterile period during which apathetic artists made soulless music to appease ephemeral fads. However, one album, if only by comparison, amazes and dazzles (Pun Intended) with a great deal of flavor and ambition. Dazzle Ships by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark is a brilliant album that revitalized a young genre, already beginning to foster redundancy, by incorporating elements of experimental music and musique concrète. However, the album was, like so many masterpieces over the years, ahead of its time. The nonmusical aspects included in the album, all the foghorns, robot noises, and radio chatter, were misunderstood and derided by the contemporary musical press that was turning is nose up at anything other than your run-of-the-mill pop song.

            In the presented review, the author refers to the short musique concrète pieces like Time Zones as filler and disparages the album for trying to be “topical.” The reviewer uses the term “topical” where most decorous musical journalists would use the word “conceptual,” because they do not want to liken the piece to other widely appreciated and respected albums, like Sgt. Pepper or Ziggy Stardust, whose concepts have been universally lauded for years. They also refer to such abstract pieces as Time Zones as filler, because musique concrète is a well-established genre, and referring to them as such would return to Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark the ethos that the author is so viciously and unjustly attempting to strip away.       

            The author goes on to deem the “soundtrack-like effects” as nothing more than “vinyl fill.” With a 21^st century perspective, one can’t help but look back on that such an indictment and laugh. Thousands of modern classics across very disparate genres, from hip hop to alt rock, use similar methods to enrich their albums’ subtext. Whether it’s one of the emotionally charged skits between each track on Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City or some of the eerie and ever-present electronic noise on Radiohead’s Kid A, such elements can be incorporated into a modern album, and the music critics won’t so much as bat an eye.

            The author only shows appreciation for the “decent electropop baubles,” by which I can only conclude they mean the more conventional synthpop singles. Don’t be fooled, the singles are great tracks with infectious hooks, but they are definitely not all this album has to offer. Dazzle Ships is a lush, ambitious masterpiece that complements only the best elements of synthpop with tasteful dabs of a vintage aesthetic applied with precocious methods of highly experimental sampling. Unfortunately, it came during an era where people didn’t want ambition, an era where fresh ideas were out of fashion, and era where music had a strict formula and a strict solution, and Dazzle Ships just wasn’t it.