I like to joke that I listen to a lot of “annoying” music, but this might take the cake as the single most irritating track anywhere in my personal collection. The screaming synthesiser in this is absolutely ridiculous, and you either love it or you hate it. While it’s yet another anti-war and anti-nuclear song, which early 80s electronica was never lacking in, “Dallas” takes that in a slightly different direction, positing that our greatest hope for survival just might be worldwide media monoculture. We’re probably closer to achieving that now than we were in the 80s, what with Hollywood movies being designed partly for the Chinese box office and all, but it hasn’t really eased tensions between those two countries. Not yet, anyway. But I like the spunk of their optimism, coy as it may be. The quaintness of the woefully outdated reference to the TV phenomenon Dallas makes it easy to chuckle at. It seems to have been a really big deal in the 80s, but nowadays is pretty forgotten for the most part. Well, maybe someday they’ll make a bad reboot of it, like with every other 80s property, and then we’ll finally achieve world peace!