Originally released in a die-cut gatefold sleeve with a two tone coloured inner sleeve, Dazzle Ships is the fourth album by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, released in 1983 on Virgin Records. The title and cover art (designed by Peter Saville) alluded to a painting by vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth based on dazzle camouflage. The album was the follow-up release to the band's hugely successful Architecture and Morality. In contrast with its celebrated predecessor, Dazzle Ships met with a degree of critical and commercial hostility, due to the inaccessible nature of half of the material it contained, particularly musique concrete sound collages, utilising shortwave radio recordings to explore cold war and eastern bloc themes. The "Radio Prague" track is the actual interval signal of the Czechoslovak Radio foreign service, including the time signal and station ID spoken in Czech. "Time Zones" is a montage of various speaking clocks from around the world. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (most often abbreviated to OMD or O.M.D.) are a synth-pop group whose founding members Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys are originally from the Wirral Peninsula, England. OMD were originally assimilated in the greater new wave batch of synthesizer-based acts of the later 1970s-early 1980s. On 3 March 2008 a remastered compact disc with bonus tracks was released, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the album. The critical hostility towards the album had cooled and the reissue of Dazzle Ships received positive reviews from Pitchfork Media and Popmatters, among others.
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