Artist: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Album: Bauhaus Staircase
Year: 2023
Grade: B
In Brief: Whether it’s the geeky synthesized sounds that bring back warm memories of the 80s, or the smooth and emotionally weighty pop melodies that would sound good in any era, OMD manages a pretty good rundown of the various things they’ve excelled at on an album that may well be their swan song. If this is how these elder statesmen of synthpop choose to go out, then it’s a strong note to end on – a testament to their long-running legacy, and also a darn good fit for a 21st century revival of the genre that’s still going strong.
As someone who only got into the music of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark within the last few years, I’m curious what sorts of memories get conjured up in the mind of a longtime fan when someone brings up their name (or more likely, the acronym OMD, since that deliberately pretentious band name is both a mouthful to say out loud and a pain in the butt to remember how to spell properly). I’d imagine some get warm waves of nostalgia rushing back as the synthetic melodies of powerful singles like “Electricity”, “Enola Gay”, the Pretty in Pink soundtrack contribution “If You Leave”, or my personal favorite, “Souvenir”, start to play in their heads again. Some probably remember them as pioneers of the early electronic music scene, becoming increasingly more bold in their experimentation until they hit a breaking point and their output took an abrupt commercial turn in the mid-80s. Some might have gotten into them thanks to the new exposure that change in direction earned them, only to wonder what the deal was when band fractured, co-founder Paul Humphreys left and took three quarters of the band with him, and founding member Andy McCluskey soldiered on making OMD records essentially as a solo act in the 90s. Tears for Fears fans can probably relate to that last bit, and much like that band’s trajectory, there was a happy ending in store for OMD later when its core members reunited in the 21st century, enjoying a respectable career renaissance that has lasted to this day. There are, quite understandably, several points in the OMD discography that are divisive not just to their fans, but also to the people who created those records. So it could have been daunting for a newbie like me to even know where to begin. But thanks to the luxury of a hindsight and a hearty recommendation from a friend who is a longtime fan, I had their critically acclaimed third album, 1981’s Architecture & Morality, to start with – as engaging and beguiling of an art-pop record as I could have hoped for in an era where the rules of the electronic music genre were still largely unwritten. I would later find quite a bit of amateur charm in their two earlier records, their 1980 self-titled album and its quickly delivered follow-up Organisation – but not before making the fatally bad decision to go forward in time from Architecture first, which led me to the disjointed and downright confusing 1983 release Dazzle Ships, only to then dump me right smack into the middle of their commercial pop period, where three albums in a row – 1984’s Junk Culture up through 1986’s The Pacific Age – largely failed to impress me outside of a few bits of ear candy here and there. I honestly couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened – there are bands that have lost me by going off the artsy-fartsy deep end, and then there are bands who have become more bland and middle-of-the-road over time, but I can’t recall very many who have done both of these things in rapid succession. Those records all have their defenders, mind you – but after witnessing how quickly they had started to fall short of the grand expectations they had set up so easily early on, I wasn’t exactly game to stick around and find out what OMD had done after the 80s.
Now to be fair, while I was vaguely aware of OMD having reformed and put out new music in the 2010s, I wasn’t actually aware that they were still doing it, and that they had put out their fourteenth (!) album, Bauhaus Staircase, in late 2023. A few accolades from friends listing their favorites at the end of that year set me straight, and with zero expectations, I decided to reacquaint myself with the band and see what had changed after thirty-odd years (from their perspective, at least – more like two years from mine). I was pleasantly surprised to find that the climate of modern day indie pop, and its eagerness to revive and recontextualize the synthetic sounds of the 80s, made OMD feel right at home. The precision and cleanliness of modern-day production values meshed fabulously with vintage synth sounds hearkening back to their early days, while picking up influences from the evolution of dance music in the intervening decades. There are moments on this album that feel as whip-smart as contemporary bands like Chvrches and Geographer whose music I often find myself swooning over, moments where I feel like I’ve been through the cycle of lament and healing that a Tears for Fears album might facilitate, and moments where I kinda-sorta-ironically want to get up and dance like I do when listening to the Pet Shop Boys. OMD was a forerunner to all of these bands in one way or another, but they show a willingness to also be influenced by the strides made in electronic music since they first came up, reinventing themselves without ever self-consciously ditching the wide-eyed innocence that made their early works so special. Humphreys and McCluskey, along with longtime keyboardist Martin Cooper and their relatively new drummer Malcolm Holmes (who played in the 90s iteration of the band very briefly before rejoining full-time in 2015), have conjured up a collection of 12 songs that are very much concerned with the here and now, even as they evoke decades-old memories. Their intent seems to have been to come up with a record that would let them could sleep peacefully at night if it turned out to be their last.
Now, let’s set some expectations – because as I established up top, there’s enough variance in the OMD fanbase that some volatility is to be expected when it comes to comparing their past and present work. This isn’t an attempt at a high-concept magnum opus in the vein of Architecture, and it sure as hell isn’t as avant-garde as Dazzle Ships. It’s definitely more polished and put together than their early works, even if some of the synth patches used here and there sound like they could have come from bulky equipment that was considered state-of-the-art in the early 80s. Bauhaus is definitely a more “pop” leaning record, though not without its ambitions. A few tracks evoke the cinematic sweep of some of those old sentimental favorites, a few push harder into club-friendly territory, a couple are heavy on spoken word and vocal samples to the point where they could be considered more “sound collages” than songs. But for the most part, you’ll find familiar song structures that catch the ear quite easily – either verses with catchy choruses, or verses that don’t need catchy choruses because the instrumental refrains are iconic enough to stick in your head as it is. Some have called Bauhaus the band’s most political record – and sure, there’s at least one track where a series of fairly recent global headlines gets rolled up into a criticism of the people who are supposed to be in charge of keeping the peace on our planet – but I often think that this album is more interested in science than politics. What’s the function of a human life? When has it run its course, and reached a point where it’s unnatural and unwieldy to prolong the inevitable? What will we leave behind for our planet when we pass on – both as individuals and as an entire species? There are times when I can admit that maybe the guys get a bit lecture-y on a few of these topics, but for the most part, I’m impressed at how well the deeply personal and the universal are interwoven on this album. I like to think that someone could unearth this record in 2064 and get as meaningful of a snapshot of the hopes and anxieties that humans felt about their world in 2023 as I did first listening to a record of theirs from 1981 in 2022. Time will tell if Bauhaus is actually OMD’s swan song, but assuming for now that it is, I’d say it’s an excellent final grace note in the discography of an often overlooked, but nonetheless highly influential band.
INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:
1. Bauhaus Staircase
The title track might expand your vocabulary a bit if you’re not familiar with various forms of German art, music, and/or dance. As the pulsating synths get up and running, McCluskey’s declaration that “I want to kiss on a Bauhaus staircase” seems at first like he’s just expressing admiration for the creative works that came out of a particularly forward-thinking period of German history pre-WWII, but there’s more to it than that – the first verse concludes defiantly with, “I wanna kick down fascist art”, which is really the crux of the entire song. Even if you know nothing about the other names and techniques mentioned throughout, that’s a statement that rings true in the modern age – hey, if it ticks off Nazis and other racist nationalists and makes their way of life feel threatened, then it’s probably doing something right! I love the squealing synth patches in the gaps between the verses here, as they slide unnervingly between notes – they’re insistent and yet weirdly earworm-y, reminding me of the band’s earliest days when they didn’t mind so much if the sounds they were making were a bit shrill or exposed the limitations of the machinery they were experimenting with. Something about the alien, robotic character of it appealed to them. While the production values overall are more modern here, that fun little nod to the past kind of puts the song in a timewarp where its sentiments could just as easily have applied in 1980 as they do in 2024.
Grade: A
2. Anthropocene
The second track on the album is its longest by far, stretching out to nearly six minutes of what might be carefree dance-pop goodness except for the huge caveat that there are sampled spoken word bits (some clean, some robotically distorted) explaining the meaning of the “anthropocene epoch” and noting the human population at different points throughout history, notably how much it’s exploded within the last hundred years or so. I’ll be honest – this was a moment where I felt a bit like I was being lectured on first listen. I absolutely believe the threat of human-caused climate change is real, and I think it’s fascinating that geologists are debating about whether our species has impacted the Earth so dramatically that we need to designate a new epoch to pinpoint where exactly it started. (Don’t expect a scientific consensus any time soon.) It’s just the sort of thing that I’d rather hear the guys sing about in their own words – which they do, starting about two minutes into the song. Even then, the lyrics are a bit jargony, but it’s clear even if you don’t understand all of the terminology that the guys find our ability to trash the planet within such a (geologically speaking) short period of time rather alarming: “Just another KT line/Start and finish of our time/A dirty mark in history/Souvenir for all to see.” Man, it hurts that they used the word “souvenir” there – it’s a callback to one of their most achingly beautiful songs (and ironically, one that didn’t even contain its own title in its lyrics). This comes across to me as a wake-up call – we’re capable as a species of creating beautiful things, but we’re also capable of untold destruction. What sort of mark should we leaving behind for the generations that follow us? The song isn’t optimistic about our long-term prospects, noting as the programmed elements drop out one by one, leaving the narration in cold silence at the end, that in a million years, global human population will be: ZERO.
Grade: B
3. Look at You Now
Do my ears deceive me? I’m getting heavy “Joan of Arc” vibes from this sentimental ballad, as its string section-like synths and angelic sampled backing vocals come wafting through the air. Yet the melody also reminds me of something from an early New Order record that I can’t quite place. There’s definitely more to it than you might initially get from the chorus, which hits you right at the beginning of the song with an almost insipid amount of optimism: “Look at you now/You’re shining and how/The dreams that you dream you live/All the love you give/Look at you now.” The verses, whose lyrics eventually start to weave in and out of the chorus, provide more of a contrast, describing an individual who feels rather drained and frustrated, the exact opposite of the powerful, positive image that the guys want to portray them as having in the chorus. The song’s too vague to make it clear who it was written for – it could be a lover, a child, or some sort of activist they hope will keep fighting the good fight. As one of the more adult contemporary pop-leaning tunes on this record, I think it does a pretty good job of splitting the difference between their early experiments with synths and sampling, and the smoother, more radio-friendly image they adopted in the mid-80s.
Grade: B+
4. G.E.M.
The first word that comes to mind when I try to describe this song is “slippery”. The rhythm is loose and syncopated, the synths have a glossy and yet sort of slimy texture, and throughout the song there’s a lot of sound manipulation going on, whether it’s making the vocals sound a shade more metallic and whisper-y or it’s muting parts of the instrumentation as though you were hearing them from behind a wall. It’s another intriguing crossroads where the group’s pop savviness and experimental tendencies meet. This song falls into the classic OMD “let the synth refrain serve as the chorus” format, with the verses coming across a bit coy and cynical as they taunt someone who is apparently trying to leave a relationship in a big, dramatic huff, but can’t quite seem to stay gone, only for the synths to response with a fun little fanfare each time. What the acronym in the title stands for is anyone’s guess. It could be the initials of whatever difficult person incurred this song’s tongue-in-cheek wrath. Or it could just be a way of sarcastically saying to them that they’re being overly precious – they’re such a GEM, geddit??!?!
Grade: B+
5. Where We Started
This is the shortest track on the album – at just under two and a half minutes, I feel like I’m just barely starting to get into it when it fades out. I’m definitely drawn in by the textures of the synth bass, and the lead synth melody that has an a sort of “alien B-movie” type quality to it – it feels like the sort of thing an 80s band might have put forth as their imaginary take on what future high schoolers would slow dance to. (Or, to reference a younger band, I could see Empire of the Sun doing something similar.) The verses are similar in tone to “Look at You Now” in the sense that they’re trying to comfort and encourage someone who is too weary to continue the fight, to send them back in time a bit and remind them where they came from and what they’re fighting for. But this might be an instance where letting the vocal melody play a supporting role on either side of a big synth refrain runs the risk of the vocals (and thus the lyrics) not being as memorable. I still like this one, but it’s the closest thing to filler we’ve heard on the album thus far, and it fades out so early that I kinda wish they could’ve done more with it.
Grade: B-
6. Veruschka
One of the record’s most confounding songs is up next, and it’s also an incredibly beautiful one – my favorite track on the album, in fact. The floating, etheral keyboards and the sampled choral bits and harps almost remind me of what an OMD/Enya collaboration might sound like. There’s an air of finality to it, like these were meant to be the parting words to someone staring down their final days as a mortal: “And if you never learn to cry/How will you ever say goodbye/And if you’re too afraid to die/How will you ever learn to fly away.” Take this chorus just by itself, and it’s a peaceful sendoff, a gentle nudge to stop fighting the inevitable and accept that all lives eventually run their course, and that it’s better to say farewell with your head held high than to go out on an angry, ungrateful note. However, the verses throw a bit of a monkey wrench into my interpretation, dropping such thorny references as “Columbine and fool Pierrot” in there, giving the impression that it’s about a deeply troubled soul wandering the rainy streets of some dark city. The title of the song – another one of those that never appears in the lyrics – is obviously a woman’s name, and the most fitting individual bearing that name would be the German model/actress Veruschka von Lendorff, who as it turns out was born into an aristocratic family at a very dark moment in her country’s history, and who had a tumultuous childhood as a result of her father’s opposition to (and involvement in a failed plot to kill) Hitler. I really did not expect to referencing Nazis this much when I started this review! It could be that the song is loosely intended as a tribute to wound up living a rather glamorous life despite coming from such troubled origins. Or I could just be making stuff up as a smokescreen to avoid admit that I have NO idea what’s going on here. But do I need to? This song hits me hard in the emotions, regardless of how I might grasp at straws trying to interpret it. I’ll be so bold as to say that it’s of the loveliest compositions in the history of synthpop.
Grade: A+
7. Slow Train
The up-tempo, syncopated number is full of buzzing, metallic synths and a noticeably more sinister attitude than the rest of the record. The playful female backing vocals and the eerie whispers of “yeah yeah” contrast against one another and against the instrumentation in rather strikingly. It’s almost like an amalgamation of the more sensual side of dark synthpop that would be explored by acts like Soft Cell, Eurythmics, and Depeche Mode not long after OMD first made their debut. It’s a weirdly glorious sound, with perhaps the one drawback being that it gets a tad repetitive after a series of false endings and restarts. The lyrics aren’t exactly what I would call coherent, but they do give the impression of a person feeling desperate because they’re running out of ways to make ends meet and growing increasingly desperate: “Break the little piggies, but it’s all gone/Saving all the pennies, but it takes so long.” This could be some sort of a commentary on wealth hoarding and the gradual disappearance of the middle class. Or, for all I know, maybe the guys are just having a bit of fun with the word salad.
Grade: B+
8. Don’t Go
This track – which appears to have been first released in 2019 as part of an utterly massive singles box set called Souvenir – isn’t a Yazoo cover, though oddly enough it does kind of remind me of Yazoo, just not that particular song. The sparkly, major chord synth arpeggio that starts it off kind of has a similar flavor to “Only You”, though once the dance beat kicks in, it’s pretty clear that we’re not in the early 80s any more. This is a fun song that I can’t say has a ton of depth to it – each verse is a very simplistic rhyming couplet leading up to a few repetitions of “Don’t go”, and a few of those couplets seem a bit amateurish, for example: “I took a ticket on a killer ride/But now it’s over and I wish I’d died.” Once again it’s really the synth refrain that does the heavy lifting – and it’s hard to complain too much when OMD has done that sort of thing like it’s second nature for so much of their career. This one’s catchy, just don’t expect to get a ton of deep meaning out of it.
Grade: B-
9. Kleptocracy
Speaking of synth hooks, this furiously upbeat dance-pop number – which almost feels like something out of the 90s – has a billion dollar one that it isn’t afraid to show off. You’ll probably guess from the title that things are about to get very political – quite bluntly so, in fact. For those who didn’t already have the word “kleptocracy” in their vocabularies (I’ll admit that I didn’t), this song does a darn good job of painting a picture of societies that put forward a veneer of being democratic and caring about the will of the people, while secretly it’s a bunch of backroom deals and corporate bullying that determines who holds the real power. Plenty of electronic bands would probably write about this sort of thing from a sci-fi perspective – a cautionary tale about what awaits humanity in the future if we don’t keep our greed and lust for power in check. But OMD grounds this one in recent, and terrifyingly real, headlines, asserting that it’s already happened and we’re merely pawns in this system that has already bought the people we’re supposedly electing. This one will catch you off guard if the huge melodic hook gets you up on your feet and you’re getting into the groove and suddenly you notice the line “Saudi money over Central Park/Khashoggi’s body got dissected.” Yikes, that’s almost too confrontational of a reference to grizzly real-life events. But in a strange way, it’s kind of appropriate that OMD gives us such a wonderful buzz with the instrumentation, only to brutally kill it off with the lyrics – kind of like that they’re suggesting that all of us common folks are too easy distracted by the circus of entertainment surrounding these corrupt leaders to really do something about it – and they have all the incentive in the world to keep it that way.
Grade: A
10. Aphrodite’s Favourite Child
This anthemic, mid-tempo tune seems to be equal parts fatalistic and romantic – it’s named for the Greek goddess of love, after all, and it seems to imply that two people have been chosen by that goddess to face down some sort of insurmountable odds in a world-ending conflict. It involves rising seas, with singing sirens trying to lure them to their deaths deep below, and the song seems to imply that only if this couple joins hands in a firm, unbroken bond can they outwit the supernatural forces trying to tear them apart. It’s good songwriting, though the melody and instrumentation seems a bit easygoing for such a climactic story, not quite commanding the same sort of emotional heft as song something like “Veruschka” or even “Look at You Now”. I actually wonder if slowing this one down a bit and allowing it to come gradually to a crescendo, rather than remaining even-keeled throughout its brisk 3.5-minute run, might have been the way to go here.
Grade: B-
11. Evolution of Species
Remember how I thought at first that “Anthropocene” was going to be nothing but a bunch of vocal samples over a dance beat for several minutes? Well, that’s exactly what this track is – a bunch of patched-together snippets about the cycle of evolution involving conception, maturation, reproduction, and expiration, mostly in English but also featuring snippets in French, Spanish, and German (as far as I can tell, at least). It’s one of those things where you more or less get the gist after a minute or so of it – basically it serves as a coda to “Anthropocene” and it implies that the eventual extinction of the human species may just be a natural endpoint that we’ll gradually have to accept. Tough pill to swallow, but OK. Three minutes of nothing but this starts to feel a bit long once we’ve grasped the dire point being made.
Grade: C
12. Healing
I’ve often joked that you can tell when you’re listening to a 1990s R&B slow jam because someone will have inevitably left a faucet dripping in the background. Well, the jokes on me, because this is a 2020s synthpop ballad, and the first thing you hear is the sound of water droplets, which becomes a sort of rhythmic backbone for this somber finale to play out against. I think it’s beautiful how the organic sound of the piano, even if it’s just playing a few simple notes, contrasts with the growing layers of various synth sounds, as if to suggest that all this human effort might look like progress, but ultimately it’s nature that will prevail. This song seems to be expressing on a very personal level what it’s been suggesting about the human race as a whole – that life is eventually going to run its course, and it’s better to accept that and be at peace with the (hopefully good) mark you’ve left on the world than to try to fight it and prolong it unnaturally. This one has a little bit of DNA in common with several of Tears for Fears’ album closers, in the sense that they’re really good at ending with songs that look back at the aftermath of traumatic events and hint at an arrival at some sort of place of healing or absolution. I’d say it’s less elaborate in how it goes about that, but appreciate the sense of calm and wonder that this one makes me feel as it gently drifts off into the evening air.
Grade: B
WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Bauhaus Staircase $1.75
Anthropocene $1
Look at You Now $1.25
G.E.M. $1.25
Where We Started $.75
Veruschka $2
Slow Train $1.25
Don’t Go $.75
Kleptocracy $1.75
Aphrodite’s Favourite Child $.75
Evolution of Species $.25
Healing $1
TOTAL: $
BAND MEMBERS:
Andy McCluskey: Vocals, bass, keyboards
Paul Humphreys: Keyboards, vocals
Martin Cooper: Keyboards, saxophone
Stuart Kershaw: Drums
LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:
MORE USEFUL LINKS:
https://www.omd.uk.com/
https://www.facebook.com/omdofficial
murlough23 
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