The 1981 Listening Post - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality

 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality

#755

by Scott E. Arciniegas

November 6, 1981

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Architecture and Morality

Genre: New Wave Synth Pop

Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Scott's Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Highlights:

Sealand

The New Stone Age

Architecture and Morality

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark has always been a band with a conflict at its center: not one of artistic differences between its songwriters or singers (although eventually those too), but of what this band is and what it's trying to do.

If one were to judge the band based on their highest-charting and best-known single, 1986's "If You Leave"—one of the many tracks that makes the soundtrack to John Hughs' Molly Ringwald vehicle, Pretty in Pink, one of the most indispensable soundtrack records of the decade—one would think them to be a competent if lightweight synth-pop band: adult men with big shoulder pads wailing like lovelorn teenagers over beeping, sequenced synths and sweeping strings.

And that is actually a pretty fair assessment of about half of OMD's catalog.

But the other side of the internal struggle driving the manouevres of this nocturnal synth orchestra is more experimental and considerably darker: guitar work echoing Joy Division, ambient soundscapes, proto-industrial percussion, choral samples bent and layered and distorted, tape samples played on a Mellotron…

These two sensibilities struggle for supremacy in OMD's 1981 album, Architecture and Morality…sometimes within the same track. The result is a record that is sweet and dark and melancholy and mournful and bouncy, which is why it's cited as a seminal influence for musicians over the subsequent decades from Depeche Mode to Spoons to Moby to The Charlatans UK.

The album's first track, "The New Stone Age" opens with creaking noises, synthesized wind, and in time a drum machine kick that echoes Kraftwerk's "Geiger Counter". When the jangling, slightly out-of-tune guitar strum comes in, followed by a buzzsaw-shrieking synth line, it becomes pretty clear that this isn't exactly a bubblegum synth pop album. Lead singer Andy McCluskey's vocals are an earnest wail, and accompanied by backup vocals in a sometimes syncopated counter-rhythm: "Oh my god, what have we done this time," the chorus goes, the line repeated only twice before the synth wails take back over, and are eventually subsumed by an airplane-like drone that fades into the distance. It's a hell of an album opener.

With track two, "She's Leaving," the bubblegum synth-pop machine kicks into gear. It's sweet and beautifully crafted, chugging ever forward, occasionally gliding in neutral to let McCluskey's croon take over. "Souvenir," the third track (and the first of the three singles Architecture and Morality produced) features the band's other vocalist, Paul Humphries, also in sweet-pop mode. From these tracks it's easier to see the groundwork laid for the edifice of "If You Leave" that would eventually tower over their back catalog.

And then comes track four, the almost-8-minute "Sealand." An ambient harbor-town soundscape and plaintive, out-of-tune melodion are joined by a mid-tempo beat and, eventually, lush synths…it's almost a dirge. Nearly halfway through the track, all but the kick, a drum machine hi-hat, and the sparest of synth chords step aside for McCluskey to sing a sad scene of seaside life in all of two lines. The remaining 3 minutes bring cacophonous industrial percussion, which then give way to a drum-free synth section. The whole thing has the feel of a Tunnel-of-Love-style amusement park ride, only it's a Tunnel of Isolation, and it's less of an amusement park and more of a depression park.

In the back half of the album these same forces continue to do battle, with haunting, often danceable (or at least sway-to-able) results.

I realize that all of this may not sound like it adds up to a glowing review. "So wait," said my girlfriend Kate, as I was describing the record to her, "did you even like it? It doesn't sound like you did."

Oh, I liked it. I actually kinda loved it. I don't know that I fully understand it—or at least I don't know that I understand how a band decides that this is the artistic direction they want to go—but I don't know that understanding something is necessary to loving it. In the case of Architecture and Morality, I'm happy to just marvel at it. And occasionally bop along to the beat.

https://open.spotify.com/album/6bR98XzGnklTORDvZ7Oc2i?si=1m6Zy5T6SKW09I_wqmM0xga