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Electropop, synthpop, technopop: call it what you will, it's back with a vengeance via a new vanguard of saucy synth-vixens, from Ladyhawke to Little Boots via Lady GaGa and LaRoux...and even a few acts whose names don't begin with the letter 'L'! But let's pause to recall how tough it was for synthesists Soft Cell when the perv-pop duo exploded across America in the early '80s: this was Van Gosse's elegant Village Voice review of the group's Nonstop Erotic Cabaret in February 1982.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

To champion an English electropop duo right now is a poor business; on all sides are heard the virile snickers of those who abominate synthesizers while upholding various yeoman guitarist-composers in their earnest, usually revivalist artisanry.

It is commonly a waste of breath or ink to assail the obscurantism of the American pop literati, but Soft Cell are so different from the current run of slick, fun, clever Anglo beep-beep bands as to deserve an all-out effort. Of course, their 12-inch epic "Tainted Love"/"Where Did Our Love Go" has already made them the past-six-month's godhead for people who go to clubs to groove and be (or fall) in love, but that is a different gang anyway, and that record, with neither song self-written, was at best an overture to the album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.

What sections off Soft Cell--Marc Almond on words and voice, David Ball on everything else--from most of the electronic herd is that they have assimilated and made functional the ancient distinction between "form" and "content." Until now even the most brilliant of the technopop artificers seemed to assume that since their instrumental ambience was so notoriously "cold, mechanical, sinister" (or perhaps "ethereal, robotic, smooth"), their tempos, subjects, and vocal delivery must follow suit. This is the same trap that the trad heavy-metallurgist falls into when he presumes that as his guitars yawp and drums bellow, so must he; thus the irritating drone 'n' chrome of so many of the synth bands, and the tendency to leaden pomp.

In contradistinction to all this is Soft Cell. Whereas elsewhere in electrosound one gets a flat foreground of rushing plasticity, minus perspective, that (as long as it has hooks) makes for a great cool-pop thrust, as on the Human League's "Don't You Want Me," with Soft Cell there is nothing but perspective. They are a relative floodtide of drama and emotionality: Almond's cracking, yearning croon; his childlike extremes of regret, cynicism, and contempt; lyrical motifs of pathos and despair; a rinky-dink "decadence"; love-death writ picturesque and small.

David Ball has altered the standard musical recipe drastically. Instead of a close cluster of monochromatic synths sounding synthetic and simpy over a bunch of slower and faster 4/4 marches, he draws from most complete, subtle, and exotic palette of keyboards and synths and dance patterns that are used mimetically, i.e. to suggest or mimic other music (and none of those "look, ma, we're lost in space" whooshies). Everything is conjured, from the dolorous angst of a "Nights In White Satin," to High Motown's piano-riffing shuffle to a theatrical carnivalism not unlike Weill, to hints of Eurodisco sheen. And while the little drummer box has that unnatural time, the "band" plays over and against and around it, instead of being cowed and ruled by a monolithic bump-click.

As for the common complaint that electropop has no tunes, only a repetitious chanting of catchy phrases and puffball observation, it is impossible to imagine even those with the fiercest antipathy to Soft Cell--who may well find them arch, coy, phony, precious, and of an overweeningly pubescent sensibility--denying their profusion of melodic structures. These are technically almost beyond Almond, who has one of those expressively tinny British boy-warbles, like Pete Shelley's without the bite, but he throws himself into his work with a fine fey fury--gushing, whispering, snappish, a wild chaser after the Big Sob.

There is no denying that compared to, say, Live At Leeds, Non Stop-Erotic Cabaret is rather desiccated stuff. It is possessed of virtually none of the visceral slash-and-burn panache that I've always lusted after in pop, being more sniff-and-bop as far as I can tell. But for luscious little tales in a kitschy demimonde of fake sound, this is it: the manic "Sex Dwarf"; the grandly sad and moving "Youth," the requiem for clubgoers "Bedsitter," the cinematic kiss-off "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye"; and much more about blackmail, alienation, and sleaze, a real Ring-cycle for out-and-abouts who read the Soho News instead of watching General Hospital.

Soft Cell have the misfortune to be gentle, fantastical, and machine-loving, qualities which offend an amazing number of people, hippies and intellectuals especially, who like things to be artlessly natural (Joe Strummer's missing teeth, the Dead), or at least certifiably serious (Eno, Rick Wakeman, Kraftwerk). Access to relatively simple and portable technology is precisely what allowed Almond and Ball to daub these glittering poptart sketches. More power to them.

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