Love Life is a breezy ride through an urban underground of singles bars that plays just like a prime-time soap opera. There are ample quantities of innuendo and outright proposition, betrayal, adultery, guilt, self-justification...and on and on. Behind the tawdry cabaret, Berlin makes glossy, shimmering music that's a competent American variant of U.K. synth pop, with carnival-calliope synthesizers and metallic textures as thin and crinkly as tin foil.

The words, however, are not so agreeably light. "You can buy me a daiquiri/You can take me home and tear my clothes off," coos singer Terri Nunn in "Touch." Such lines are unlikely to do anything but earn Berlin a reputation as a one-gimmick band – that gimmick being plain-spoken sex. And though Nunn has claimed in interviews that she's "never had a one-night stand," many of the lyrics on Love Life could have been lifted from the Penthouse letters page.

Too bad, because Berlin can write sharp, invigorating pop tunes when they set their mind to it, and Nunn has a very alluring voice – Debby Harry with a gutsy edge. "Dancing in Berlin" and "Pictures of You" are rousing, full-blooded dance-pop numbers, and "No More Words," produced by Giorgio Moroder, is a haunting, bittersweet anthem of romantic resolve. Perhaps they'll broaden their conceptual base next time and make a brilliant pop album; they're certainly not incapable of it. (RS 422)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH