The bonus tracks include 'Annex' (the B-side to 'Enola Gay') and the post-Factory version of 'Electricity', as well as the four tracks from a 7-inch EP included with early copies of the LP (I think it was released with a brown background rather than black), consisting of very early live and experimental tapes. Only the downer version of 'The More I See You' seems out of place, but it's redeemed by its ironic stance. 'Second Thought', 'Statues', and especially 'Stanlow' (dedicated as it is to the power plant where the father of singer Andy McCluskey worked) achieve a stateliness that few of the band's contemporaries could even approach. Other tracks barely rise to the energy-level of the single, but this is not a bad thing. Even the single, 'Enola Gay', is in wry memoriam of the atomic bomb-dropping airplane of World War II. It's mostly rather pretty, but its prettiness is undermined by a pervasive melancholy.
As melodic as many of its like-minded contemporaries were musically angular-ironic, considering the Kraftwerk reference of the title-this second album by OMD transcends its immediate predecessor and most of its contemporaries by miles.
