1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 490. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Architecture & Morality (1981)

So far, I’d say that these are my favourite of the synth-pop groups, perhaps because they use the synths to do two thing that they’re good at compared to conventional instruments – experimental fractured pieces like the track The New Stone Age, or swooping lyrical pieces like She’s Leaving. That they also use non-digital guitars (Andy McCluskey giving a good funky groove to The New Stone Age) and piano also helps, as do the vocals of McCluskey and Paul Humphreys (who gets a credit for “radios” amid the usual tranche of keyboard types). 

I’d say my favourite Eighties synth-pop track of all is an OMD one; Enola Gay, which comes from the album prior to this one. Not only is it a good tune, with a good vocal performance, it demonstrates the strange dichotomy of this genre. It’s a swooping, poppy tune, but it’s about dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The darkness and seriousness of the lyrics are often masked by the seeming disposability of the music. 

The famous track from this particular album has to be Joan Of Arc – actually two tracks; Joan Of Arc and Maid Of Orleans. For me, these evoked an oddly specific memory. See, I used to collect a magazine called The Unexplained, which was all about such things as UFOs, cryptobeasts, ghosts, Fortean phenomena, all that kind of nonsense. Issue One came with a flexidisc that was supposedly recordings of people speaking from beyond the grave, vague fragments of speech heard against a lot of background crackle. To my 11-year old self, it was utterly terrifying. On being reminded of this, I tracked it down and, well, there’s no provenance to it to suggest that it isn’t just fakery, and it’s not in the least bit scary. Childhood fear: exorcised.

However, for some reason, I think I must have heard OMD’s Maid Of Orleans just before or after me and my friends played the flexi-disc, and so the track evokes a sense of fear in me – I actually think that the synth sounds are more eerie than some crackly voices, with or without the subconscious associations. Although, the sparse and lonely soundscape of the seven-minute Sealand is perhaps the more eerie track with its heartbeat motif. 

The latter half of the album moves into more of a spacy dreamcape, drifting away into The Beginning And The End, a wistful piece that uses the synth sounds to great effect. That the album overall feels more about evoking mood rather than lamping you in the face with the message of the lyrics makes it that much better than the prior Eighties synth albums. It still feels somewhat of its time, but less so than Heaven 17 did.