In fact, the very next track couldn't be further from the opener with the gentle floating synths of She's Leaving. A dramatic pair of notes and a snare hit and we're drifting on Kraftwek arpeggios and synth choirs. McCluskey's vocal is smooth and creamy as he describes a woman's disillusionment with her relationship. A perfect example of UK synthpop: dynamic and despite being quite high bpm feels dreamy and slow. A dark keyboard bass drone grind below the final lines as they are repeated with sadness: "The more we learn the less we know".
Sounvenir was the first single and the vocal is taken by the other one (sorry, Paul Humphreys) after a genre-marking vocal melody played on a bell like synth tone. Humphrey's much slighter voice lists the things that have consumed his life like creative work and however much he progresses his feelings still remain. It's a pleasant wafting afternoon third glass of riesling when you're twenty type of song and neither offends nor draws attention.
Sealand seems like it's going to be an instrumental. Keyboards interplay often dissonantly before they coalesce, incorporating the outliers in a more complex harmony while the gently descending motif gathers strength. There is a cinematic quality to it reinforced by the dynamics and space. Eventually, we do get a vocal which, in it's entirety (the phrases sparse and stretched): "Sealand, forget a friend, she'll not leave there again. Mother, sister at home. These I'd value so." A heartbeat electro kick drum guides us into more gentle swirls of keyboards when suddenly a clanging noise like hammering or an engine clunks in time momentarily before fading into an even more ethereal outro. Is this about the world war two sea fort that became the sovereign principality ourside British waters because of pirate radio? McCluskey has reported denied this (and the lyric doesn't help either way)
The oddity at the centre of this album is its most engaging passage as the old disc is flipped for side two and two songs about or inspired by or created within cooee of the notion of Joan of Arc take up almost half of the vinyl side (but that's not a memory as I never had the vinyl of this, just a cassette and more recently a cd).
Joan of Arc begins with a falsetto note held by breath and a long delay. McCluskey comes in with a Brian Wilsonish melody that is soon borne on electrodrums and string synth. When the real drums kick in the arrangement is like a synthpop reading of Sloop John B, comlplete with glockenspiel. A drumless interlude is broken by a soaring third verse an octave higher. The song ends with the band retreating as the now choral echoed vocal is joined by another as they gently close. Joan of Arc as a kind of California Girl.
What I always think is a crossfade is actually just a new track. A jarring chord on a mellotron is followed by another on an organ. And again. Then a speedy waltz advances with a military accent. Mellotron strings whine out the vocal melody which McCluskey takes up: "If Joan of Arc had a heart would she give it as a gift to such as me...." The mellotron changes key oddly but then it's clear why: McCluskey can't make it high enough to go an octave over it. So it's less than that but still very comfortably airborne. Back in the home key the strings bear us on their floating crest as the drums beat a warlike march. Fade.
I know people who found this doubling up annoying: why write two slight things about the same person? Well, they're different statements. Bother are romantic of sorts but seem to be from different narrators, first a feisty teenaged fan who thought his confused love/worship of the figure was returned, if cruelly and then a more mature voice singing a lament: "she cared so much she offered up her body to the grave."
I had this on tape until recently and remember my cassette was always half wound so it would be near this mini song cycle. The only other OMD artefact I had was the 45 of Enola Gay. I remember feeling very superior, confident that I was the only one in any room who knew that it was about the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima as everyone else bopped along to the infectious, dancey hit. The song meaning was actually pretty common knowledge but until I understood that I felt a thrill in knowing that it was a party favourite about a cataclysm, there was an eerie tingle to that. The Joan of Arc songs are like that but grown up. They are serious, taut and shaped exactly as they need to be, fitting so perfectly they feel crossfaded in the recollection. Beautiful.
A light beeping melody. Choral aahs on the mellotron. A quacking Farfisa organ progression. The piece forms and builds with synth drums, hammering and tool sounds over an engine like pulse. Discordant ghosts of phrases from the electrical field. The scale is grand but dark. The edifice of sound, the building feels like an office block or a Ballardian hi-rise estate tower. The title track does seem to express its name. As with Gary Numan, OMD learned the lessons of Kraftwerk when it came to instrumentals: treat them like atmosphere, set the scene the rest will follow. This is a small but welcome wonder on the home stretch.
Georgia couldn't be more contrasting with its bright and pealing synth riff and electro percussion. A shouted upbeat vocal. The boppy splendour conceals a lyric of separation. "Dancing in the rings of the western world. Blindfolds on but we don't care." A sudden turn into a whining replay of the chords without the arpeggio shows us how a simply change in presentation of the same music can alter its entire mood. A gunshot and it's done.
A beautiful sobriety ends the album with The Beginning and the End. A bittersweet keyboard introduction gives way to a jangling guitar arpeggio. McCluskey's voice is a smooth, breathy croon as he sings about the beginning and the end with the kind of modal melody we have heard throughout the album. His voice shifts seamlessly into his glassy falsetto as the the gentle synthesiser wash moves below into the fade.
The thing that lifts bands of any genre above the main is always character. As far as synth pop went there are few that do this: Numan had his paranoid sci-fi cityscapes, Soft Cell found the conduit to soul shouting, John Foxx went full Ballard and the Human League were soon to make the biggest shift from big bleak swathes to pop that went down like dessert. OMD from their World War II name to Enola Gay to the aching intensity of the Joan of Arc songs brought history. Not just in the personalising of watching Jeanne leave them in the field or Enola Gay as a big sky mumma whose kiss will never fade away as the mushroom cloud expands. The other kind of history they bring is to establish a frank admission of Karftwerk's influence before moving off in many different paths, adding more cinematic atmosphere and a joyous songcraft that led all the way back to the Zombies or the Beatles.
The result is an album that sounds like 1981 in a glass, this sip sparkles, that one warms and all of it reminds me of the brutalist '70s buildings of Griffith Uni, late nights with 4ZZZ finishing assignments longhand and those first few steps into the dimly lit hall of a party. Sealand cured my hangovers and Maid of Ornleans almost always brought me just short of tears. A series of welcome memories that don't have to be nostalgic.
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