OMD: Bauhaus Staircase

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The eagerly-anticipated return of Wirral synth pop legends Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Darkish isn’t with out the same old diploma of fanfare and feverish celebration. Greater than 40 years right into a vastly influential profession, their newest studio album Bauhaus Staircase proves that their knack for crafting good digital pop tunes stays intact. 

OMD’s fourteenth album Bauhaus Staircase has been three years within the making, birthed by core members Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys placing down preliminary concepts while separated by no less than 200 miles from one different throughout the disorientating Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

If the six 12 months hole between this album and its predecessor (2017’s high 4 charting The Punishment Of Luxurious) appears interminable, then that’s completely comprehensible given these circumstances.

Nonetheless, followers needn’t have anxious, because the band have been steadily gaining a complete new technology of avid followers (augmenting their loyal hardcore fanbase from the start who’ve grown up with them) since their 2010 comeback album Historical past Of Trendy.

Every of their three earlier albums (English Electrical was launched in 2013) has been extra profitable than the one earlier than….and as of at present – Friday third November – information has it that Bauhaus Staircase has surpassed all of their earlier high 5 albums by getting into at No. 2 within the official UK album charts – one place above the Rolling Stones and two above Duran Duran – and solely saved off the highest spot by the ever-present, all-conquering Taylor Swift! Not a foul achievement!

On condition that the album was launched in a bewildering array of codecs (no less than seven totally different colored vinyl variants, together with a particular first version vinyl and 2CD version, together with common single and double CD and even cassette tape), you’ll suppose that every one this may have been in full useless if the album had stalled outdoors the highest 10 at finest.

Solely eight months in the past, followers had loved the well timed reissue of Dazzle Ships to commemorate its fortieth anniversary (assessment right here), and certainly, there are well timed nods to that classic album’s beguiling mixture of pop songs, atmospheric synth ballads and spiky experimentation featured inside the tracks on Bauhaus Staircase.

So is the brand new OMD file any good? Emphatically, sure, in fact it’s. In reality, in some locations it’s totally spellbinding in its understated magnificence. The wonderful thing about this album is that it doesn’t sound laboured in any respect – every of the 12 tracks is completely executed, organized and produced. Each observe – bar one – is lower than 4 minutes in size (most have a period of round three minutes). That could be a measure of how concise the enhancing is right here. Nothing sticks round lengthy sufficient to assemble moss or turn out to be drained.

The title observe – and lead single – Bauhaus Staircase kicks the entire thing off with its crystal clear laser-guided mechanical precision. It’s a brilliantly addictive skittering digital groove over which Andy McCluskey waxes lyrical about his want for artwork and tradition to counteract the ills of the world, while nonetheless mentioning that the one artwork that must be banished is that practised by extremists (‘I’m gonna kick down fascist artwork’).

It’s an escapist musing of types which comes throughout as political however with out being too proselytising, tempered by Andy McCluskey’s romantic flip of phrase (one thing which he has completed so effectively previously on a few of OMD’s greatest early 80s hits).

Anthropocene which follows is a chilling ‘finish of civilisation’ rumination on the affect of present human exercise on the planet which is able to inevitably result in our personal immolation and extinction. Set to a pulsing digital backdrop which is part-Kraftwerk (in fact) and likewise partly a acutely aware throwback to Dazzle Ships-era sampled voices and speeches, it’s no much less gripping for that. That is the only prolonged observe on the album at slightly below 6 minutes, nevertheless it by no means outstays its welcome.

Anthropocene is bookended by its close to relative / counterpart on aspect two – the penultimate observe Evolution Of Species, one other Kraftwerk-esque quantity with spoken and sampled voices which as soon as once more cope with an identical subject material.

All through the album there’s a nice emphasis on programmed beats and glacial synth patterns, however the pop songs listed here are among the many strongest issues the band have ever completed, and are on a par with the most effective of their basic Nineteen Eighties work. The extra private lyrics are discovered on the reflective and downtempo numbers like Look At You Now and the sadly all-too-brief ballad The place We Began, however even right here these extra melancholy tracks are worthy of single materials.

G.E.M. might be the odd one out among the many complete set of songs right here – it’s a a lot quicker and extra jagged sounding affair with an pressing, lurching electro-rhythm the like of which OMD haven’t deployed earlier than.

Better of all, nonetheless, and shutting aspect one is the ravishingly stunning Veruschka, a really gorgeous and atmospheric string-laden ballad that conjures up photographs of driving in mist-shrouded Alpine landscapes. It’s a kind of songs which I might dearly like to final for some time longer than it does….it’s throughout after simply three and a half minutes…leaving me wanting extra.

There are two intriguing diversions too: the primary, Gradual Practice which opens aspect two, is a lifeless ringer for Goldfrapp, it needs to be mentioned – proper all the way down to the title, its glam stomp rhythm (which itself borrows from OMD’s personal 1991 basic Crusing On The Seven Seas) and dimly-lit, gritty digital undertow, together with the feminine vocal ‘na-na-na’ and Andy’s personal ‘yeah yeah’ interjections. If we had been none the wiser, we might swear that this was a cleverly concocted tribute to Alison G and Will Gregory… however then, having mentioned that, it may be argued that with out the likes of OMD (and contemporaries Depeche Mode) setting the template for electro-pop, there would most likely be no Goldfrapp.

The opposite which instantly follows is OMD’s earlier stand-alone observe Don’t Go, which acted as a teaser for his or her 2019 fortieth anniversary Memento full singles anthology, dusted down and included on this album’s working order (it was beforehand accessible on disc 2 of the Memento singles assortment). Its intro is so harking back to one other legendary 80s synth-pop duo – Yazoo – that it comes as an excellent larger irony that it shares its title with one among Clarke and Moyet’s personal enormous hits! However hey, so what? It’s nonetheless as catchy because it comes!

Kleptocracy is the band at its most political, and right here they revisit the identical driving bass guitar-propelled musical template that gave us Sister Marie Says (from Historical past Of Trendy) and Dresden (from English Electrical). Each of those, in fact had been descendants of the basic Enola Homosexual. However that’s the place the comparisons finish: right here Andy’s pressing, electronically handled vocals (and even some discernible autotune), pouring scorn on corrupt capitalist regimes and narcissistic despots the world over, convey the entire shebang proper as much as the current.

The closing pair of ballads Aphrodite’s Favorite Youngster and Therapeutic respectively start with the previous acquainted 1981 Structure & Morality-era choral mellotrons, and the sound of an amplified sampled water droplet as the straightforward understated rhythm. The heartfelt sentiments of Aphrodite (‘Can you are taking me slowly / To a imaginative and prescient of your promised land….In the event you want me, I’ll be there when all of the worlds collide’) are set to an association that alternately surges after which settles again all the way down to relative calm, while the showstopping nearer Therapeutic recollects the melodramatic All That Glitters – the finale from 1991’s glorious Sugar Tax album.

Andy McCluskey has already said in current interviews (speculatively?) that this might presumably be the ultimate OMD album, and whether it is certainly the case, then there actually isn’t any finer strategy to put a full cease or emphatic flourish to such a distinguished and vastly profitable – in addition to influential – profession that has spanned 5 many years (god, that makes us all really feel so bloody previous!) and given us so many good anthemic synth pop classics. Hopefully, in time, Bauhaus Staircase will be regarded with the identical type of excessive esteem and positioned up there with the most effective of them.

All phrases by Martin Grey 

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