Still, there’s nothing unwieldy about this combination the fit is as smooth as OMD’s original progression. Their first album in 14 years, ‘History Of Modern’, from its austere title to its Peter Saville-designed cover, wants us to believe it’s an industrial monolith made by grey-shirted scholars with unfussy haircuts, but it’s as soaked in big late-80s chords as it is bound by strict electronic principles. It’s just that while they were toiling for the advancement of earnest electronica, they were also firing out whopping great mainstream chart bullets. And let’s not deny this footprint: OMD’s formative singles Messages, Electricity, Enola Gay and Souvenir – a roll-call of evergreen synth riffs – are a bedrock of modern 80s revivalism. Fat, singalong hits don’t fit with a narrative that rates OMD a profound influence on hip 21st century acts like LCD Soundsystem and The xx. Saturday on WBEZ-FM 91.5.Revisionists have got to grips with Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (let’s use OMD) recently, boiling them down to their more experimental passages on 1983’s serious electronic classic Dazzle Ships, glossing over later Brat Pack anthems ‘If You Leave’, ‘(Forever) Live And Die’ and the successful early-90s full-pop comeback ‘Sailing On The Seven Seas’. Greg Kot co-hosts “Sound Opinions” at 8 p.m.
Until that time comes, McCluskey says with a laugh, OMD “will keep writing these cheerful pop melodies full of dark, dystopian lyrics.” My hope is that people will get through this, we will adjust and overcome.”
But there is hope at the end of the album. We’ve been lured into this toxic mindset. We’ve been brainwashed to think my neighbors don’t respect me because my car isn’t modern enough, or my kids think I’m a bad guy because I didn’t buy them the newest Xbox. We’re materially better off, but we’re less happy. “We’ve appropriated the title and applied it to the modern world. “I’ve known that painting since I was teenager - it hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool,” McCluskey says. On the latest OMD album, the title track is based on a 19th-century Italian painting, Giovanni Segentini’s “The Punishment of Luxury” (originally titled “The Punishment of Lust”). We ended up using loads and loads of varnish.” We could ‘craftsmen’ our way around the tracks. If our original idea was not always strong, we didn’t have time to adjust and we ended up overlaying things. “They could have been better if we had more time. “Saying things like that upset Americans, of course, because those more expedient records coincided with our American success,” he says.
McCluskey acknowledges that his frankness about this era of OMD isn’t particularly popular with the fans who came to the band around the time “If You Leave” cracked the top 5 on the American singles chart. That’s my forte, but in the mid- to late-’80s I was just writing down the first words coming to my mind, which were slightly cliched lyrics.” When we’re at our best, our lyrics are not the usual subjects for pop songs. We were relying on our ability to write and play music when we didn’t have time to develop the best ideas. It’s a good song from a period when we were writing a lot of songs quickly out of necessity. “We had nothing walking into the studio, so Paul sits at the piano and gets some chords, we put together some drum samples, and I came up with lyrics that did the job. The song, “If You Leave,” became OMD’s biggest hit in America, though McCluskey is somewhat sheepish about the quality as it was written at a time when he and Humphreys were hurriedly cranking out songs to fill out albums.
In 1986, when Hughes was looking for a closing song for “Pretty in Pink,” a movie he scripted, he called OMD at a pivotal time in the duo’s career. Hughes was a new-music fan who would sprinkle the soundtracks to his movies with songs he discovered in the overflowing Wax Trax import bins. Those records filtered into America, thanks in part to adventurous record stores such as Wax Trax in Chicago, which was frequented by John Hughes, a young movie director and script writer from the suburbs. Combining cheap equipment with innovative lyrics and alluring melodies, OMD’s early singles, including “Electricity,” “Enola Gay” and “Joan of Arc,” became hits, and the duo’s first four albums created a template for electro-pop that was not only melodic and danceable, but cerebral and frequently disquieting. Humphreys had some knowledge of electronics so he ended up building his own machines to make noise, and McCluskey ordered a cheap synthesizer from his mother’s mail-order catalog for the equivalent of about $10.