Today, it often feels as if the world is on the precipice of disaster.
It’s the stuff that almost feels like origin texts for how we live now, artists 40 years ago using new technology to mull over science fiction becoming fact in a rapidly evolving, unnerving civilization. This is the stuff of nuclear anxiety, post-industrial and postmodern mindsets, a creeping sense of Cold War paranoia. Those strains of new wave have endured, as have all the more grandly melancholic corners of ‘80s alternative music.īut there’s this other version of synth-pop, deeply influential in its own right and in many ways a counterpoint to broad, summary definitions of the decade. When people talk about the ’80s as a cultural signifier - about how artists are constantly excavating one ’80s reference point or another, creating cycles of nostalgia in the process - it tends to be a certain fuzzy, romantic version of the decade, one of escapism and big blockbusters in movies and music alike.
They gave us one of the great albums from the early synth-pop era. Because when OMD released this album, 40 years ago tomorrow, they gave us a whole other archetype before the one everyone knows them for. OMD might get more credit in the grand scheme of the new wave era, and yet Organisation remains a bit overlooked - not quite an obscurity but a forgotten gem.
#OMD ENOLA GAY ALBUM MOVIE#
OMD’s artier roots might even remain obscured in general when we’re decades removed and many would only recall them as one of those synth-pop one-hit wonders in America, when a few would maybe recognize other singles like “Dreaming” or “So In Love” alongside “If You Leave.” The story is almost a direct parallel to that of Simple Minds, another adventurous and innovative European new wave act that are primarily remembered stateside for their crossover John Hughes movie hit than they are for the richness of their catalog. OMD’s sophomore album Organisation doesn’t necessarily come up all the time in the conversation about classic ’80s albums. Before they soundtracked Pretty In Pink, they soundtracked a vision of the world that was far more tense and eerie. But before OMD became one of the acts to successfully bridge the futurism and avant-garde tendencies of early synth-pop into the grand romantic gestures and bulletproof pop hooks of its mid-’80s mainstream insurgence, they were architects of a whole different thing. That is one idea of the ‘80s, one historical pop shorthand we go back to again and again.
You think of giant swooping synths and yearning vocals and gauzy memories of young love and heartbreak. When you think of big end-credits drama and synth-pop swoon, when you think of that shorthand of an ’80s prom ballad beamed in from our collective pop culture memory, you think of “If You Leave.” You think of OMD’s signature song playing behind that climactic high school scene and you think of Molly Ringwald. Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark gave us an archetype.