Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Dazzle Ships [1983] [FLAC]

MOJO Magazine: Buried Treasure "Album That Time Forgot."

1. "Radio Prague" arranged by OMD 1:18
2. "Genetic Engineering" 3:37
3. "ABC Auto-Industry" 2:06
4. "Telegraph" 2:57
5. "This Is Helena" 1:58
6. "International" 4:25
7. "Dazzle Ships (Parts II, III & VII)" 2:21
8. "The Romance of the Telescope" 3:27
9. "Silent Running" 3:34
10. "Radio Waves" OMD, John Floyd 3:45
11. "Time Zones" arranged by OMD 1:49
12. "Of All the Things We've Made" 3:27

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 bands 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.

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