Today: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Pretending to See the Future
Now, back in 1982-83, I think, I bought Architecture & Morality by OMD (as they are usually called). I must have been about 15 at the time. At any rate, they were kind of grouped together with bands like Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds and such. And the genre in Sweden was called, broadly, “synth”. A much besmirched genre it was, too, later on with dubious connections to the New Romantics genre (a genre that generally encompassed what we called “synth”). But unlike the aforementioned bands, OMD sounded murky and glum. Possibly, this had to do with the use of the first Emulator or some such beast, generating lo-fi choral backgrounds. I’m not sure I really liked them, but being 15, it was nice being difficult.
But now, more than 20 years later, I hear those songs differently: like moody punk played on synthesizers, like post punk without the aggro, but with the emo. The earliest OMD songs has not only aged well, they have matured, and in the Peel sessions version that I listened to when biking thru the snow, the roughness of live mixes oh-so-well with the remains of ’77 punk and the emergence of the synthesizer as a pop instrument.