[…continued from this post]

Five and a half years ago, we wrapped up an epic 75 post thread on the complete album oeuvre of OMD examined in Monastic detail. OMD are a prime Core Collection band for me with many ups and downs in their storied career of 44 years. Ever since their Reformation in 2006, the band have recorded three new albums that have delighted these ears and have been on an upward artistic trajectory with impressive tours of the major markets, and a series of albums that have debuted higher, and higher in the UK charts with every outing. With the appearance of their newest release, “Bauhaus Staircase,” the time is ripe to revisit this thread and to update the famous PPM Rock G.P.A. graph. Have the band managed to keep with their modern standards with the latest work; suggested that it’s their swan song by the band prior to its appearance? Let’s find out.

ROCK G.P.A.

OMD

Bauhaus Staircase 2023

3

We immediately bought the DL of the title track single on the day of release last August. On the single, OMD managed to craft a reasonably commercial tune that nonetheless managed to combine fine art and high culture references as well as politics into the heady swirl of the lyric that was the type of effort that only OMD would have made. That they managed to give the best possible shout out to the still astonishing debut album by Pere Ubu, never mind turning that into the prime vocal hook on the single, was immediately endearing to me. Even if in terms of modern OMD lead singles, it was possibly middling OMD goods; Far better than the execrable “If You Want It” yet less striking than “Metroland” or Isotype” had been.

It’s hard to imagine, but OMD have played science geek second fiddles to Nick Cave, who beat them to a song entitled “Anthro[p]ocene” by six years; though that’s just a blip on the epoch scale of things. Naturally, OMD took the science to the extreme, with synthetic voices [a trope common to all of their last three albums] discussing the concept and enumerating the number of humans across a huge scale of time. All set to a Cossack-friendly melody with a 4/4 beat. Andy cnn be said to have shared the song with their synthetic voices as a duet where he sounded like he played second fiddle to them. In keeping with that thought, the Voice Of Authority got the last word here with the punchline to the song’s ultimately bitter cosmic joke.

“Look At You Now” was a bit soppy. The treacly melody was not what I really wanted to hear from OMD and the song managed to highlight for the first time, an issue that would keep me a bit distant from this album. Namely, the swamping of McCluskey’s vocals in effects that ultimately muddied up his singing and had a distancing effect on my relation to it. I dislike straining to hear a human vocal performance through a haze of synthetic fog.

The rhythm to “G.E.M.” was calculated to make listeners want to skip for the first time in ages. Once more McCluskey had effects ladled heavily over his vocals, which were further doubled for impact. The effects [including vocoder] were twice as heavy as with the preceding song. Where this song managed to get away with that conceit was down to the actually fascinating lyrics and unusual rhythmic structure of the song. The jaunty vibe of the music was completely at odds with the cryptic darkness of the lyric.

Next: …Middling