The fourth album by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the title and cover art for Dazzle Ships was designed by Peter Saville, the principal designer of record sleeves for Factory Records artists, and alluded to a painting by vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth based on dazzle camouflage.
The album was the follow-up release to the band's hugely successful Architecture and 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 concrete 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), both up-tempo numbers, and ballads. Two singles were released from Dazzle Ships, "Genetic Engineering," and "Telegraph," which achieved moderate chart success.
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 their 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.
Most interesting to Waist High was that among other forms of instrumentation, Dazzle Ships saw the band begin to explore digital sampling keyboards, the use of the typewriter, and the use of the Speak & Spell.
In March, a remastered Dazzle Ships with bonus tracks was released, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the album.
Material: wikipedia.org
