Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark | The History of Modern

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark | The History of Modern: "

Most Likely To: remind people that OMD were once popular, but not that they were once important.

The 1980s was a decade that ate its own musical young, gobbling up many young bands that began the era as challenging, cutting-edge combos and shitting them out at the end as pale echoes of themselves, guilty by Ringwald association. Simple Minds, The Psychedelic Furs, Yello, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and many more; in 1980, they were all respected post-punk outfits but by 1989 they were all considered (in the U.S., anyway) big-haired, lightweight MTV has-beens, an irritating perception that still short-changes many ’80s bands their rightful places in history.

Few had their legacy bitch-slapped quite as badly as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys mixed musique-concrete, Krautrock, and the Merseyside melodicism native to their hometown of Liverpool and were initially as highly-regarded as Wire or Joy Division, with whom OMD shared the legendary art director Peter Saville. Their initial four albums are uniformly excellent and challenging, culminating with the back-to-back masterpieces of the ethereal yet unsettling Architecture and Morality and the difficult, brilliant Dazzle Ships.

They were the brightest boys in class, ruminating on science, war, religion, and every other topic that fucks up mankind, until their fifth album, Junk Culture, where they discovered that ultimate topic that fucks up mankind: fucking. Junk Culture was still loaded with enough sonic tomfoolery and oddball insights to make it OMD’s last great album, but it marked a shift away from the weighty concerns of their initial albums and toward a new emphasis on standard pop music tropes, ultimately leading to their standing in the U.S. as the one-hit-wonders playing in the ether as Molly Ringwald rode off into the sunset with Andrew McCarthy.

Humphreys departed after two additional good but unremarkable albums while McCluskey soldiered on for three more OMD albums before packing it in and becoming the unlikely Svengali behind Spice Girls knockoffs Atomic Kitten. Now, after more than two decades apart, the original core of OMD has reunited and dropped a new album, The History of Modern.

The signs leading up to the release were promising: Humphreys and McCluskey were working together again, recent critical re-evaluations finally recognized Dazzle Ships as the classic it always was, Saville was back in the fold, and the title was one that suggested the band had a renewed focus on big topics. The end result, however, is less auspicious than just okay.

The History of Modern won’t restore OMD to the upper heights of the post-punk pantheon where they resided in 1982, but it’s a decent continuation from where the band left off after 1986’s The Pacific Age. The music on many tracks is excellent, and songs like “Sister Marie Says,” “RFWK” and “The History of Modern (Part 1)” and “(Part 2)” demonstrate that OMD have lost none of their ability to combine indelible melodies with propulsive yet ethereal technology–no other band has ever been able to conjure up synthetic heavenly hosts with the panache OMD routinely displayed. “New Holy Ground,” which is built around the sounds of someone walking down a deserted hallway, recalls the band’s moody second album, Organisation.

While some tracks find OMD losing their way musically–the souped-up synths of “The Future, the Past and Forever” sound more like warmed-over Pet Shop Boys than OMD-–the lyrics are the main disappointment on The History of Modern. The single in search of a John Hughes sountrack “If You Want It” is awash in greeting card sentimentality, while “Pulse” only serves to demonstrate that McCluskey has never been a very convincing horndog.

It’s too bad OMD didn’t work out a song exchange with Kylie Minogue, sending her “Pulse” in exchange for her OMD-inflected “All the Lovers,” as she routinely rides would-be musical Viagra like “Pulse” to its intended destination, while McCluskey just sounds like a dope. And “Save Me,” the tacked-on mash-up of the band’s early single “Messages” with Aretha Franklin is enjoyable but pointless.

On the whole, it’s good to have OMD back, and the best parts of The History of Modern demonstrate that the revived band can go toe to toe with its legacy on musical grounds. But unless they rediscover their early ambition on the lyrical front, the combination of excellent music with banal words will continue to make any future albums cases of architecture and mundanity.

Watch the video for “If You Want It” from OMD:

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