Album: Ladytron

Light & Magic, Invicta Hifi/Telstar

With a name lifted from the first Roxy Music album, and a style adopted virtually wholesale from the first great wave of Eighties techno-pop synthesists, Ladytron brook no subtleties in their determination to lead the electroclash revival. Their layers of stilted analogue synth ostinatos inescapably recall the work of pioneers such as Kraftwerk, Devo, Depeche Mode and The Human League, while their mixed-gender line-up follows the template laid down by the latter and adhered to rigorously by subsequent synth-pop combos such as Stereolab and Add N To (X). The group's second album, Light & Magic, is in effect an exercise in techno-antiquity, a retro-electro offering conforming to all the hoariest clichés about the unemotional nature of electronic music. The fizzing synth riffs stomp along with military firmness, while the impossibly jaded female vocals do their best to impress upon us the alienated, robotic condition of modern life. Yes, it's that imaginative. But while anyone can make soulless android analogies with a synthesiser, it takes genuine wit and skill to humanise machine-music in the manner of The Human League, and that seems way beyond Ladytron's capacity: it's as if all the droll ironies of Kraftwerk's art had been washed away in the intervening quarter-century. There are occasional glimpses of something more satisfying, such as the bleak commentary on the cult of youth in "Seventeen" ("They only want you when you're 17/ When you're 21 you're no fun/ They take a polaroid and let you go/ Say they'll let you know, so come on"), but in general, the future of today sounds much like the future of tomorrow, only with a humour bypass.