Monday, December 14, 2015

Genetic Engineering by OMD

1983's Dazzle Ships came on the heels of the most successful OMD album ever done, before or since.  The boys of OMD wrote some great stuff on this album, but they also sprinkled it with a bunch of odd tape looping, musique concrète stuff that utilized some early samples of weird stuff (like radar pings from a ship, time stamps from Czechoslovakia, and even weirder stuff.

Some of that feels relatively harmless now; it's kinda smug, self-absorbed, artsy stuff that isn't necessarily very memorable to listen to very often, but it's not terrible.  And what's occasionally forgotten is that there are actually some great tracks on Ships.  The song "Genetic Engineering" is, unsurprisingly since I picked it here, one such.

The band stated that they've specifically mimicked some elements of Kraftwerk's "Computer World"—but I'll let you be the judge of how obvious that is.  Personally, I don't see much...