I make furniture music/...the modern style of interior decoration," Bill Nelson sings on Sound-on-Sound. True enough, and that's the one flaw in the mechanical bliss of Red Noise's debut. Like the high-tech designers who turn tractor-trailer tires into spacious armchairs and create coat closets from cyclone fences, Nelson can lapse into novelty-item overkill. His compositions serve as showcases for a technology that's reduced to ornamentation. The synthetic burps, whines, wails and squeegees that bubble from Sound-on-Sound's densely textured surface are occasionally more enticing than the songs themselves.

This passion for production isn't new: ever since Nelson, then leader of the now-defunct Be Bop Deluxe, first hooked up with producer John Leckie on 1976's Sunburst Finish, he's been bolstering his futuristic scenarios with spaceage effects. By last year's Drastic Plastic, Be Bop's final record, Nelson's studio presence had begun to supplant his own guitar virtuosity as the musical focus of the group. Little of this development, however, shows up on The Best of and the Rest of Be Bop Deluxe, a last-gasp double album whose Best largely duplicates 1977's Live! In the Air Age. The Rest consists of the usual marketing-concept set of B sides and footnote-to-history floor scrapings. Example: the utopian "Quest for the Harvest of the Stars," an embarrassing concoction of Walt Disney fanfares and Beatles-like harmonies (with a riff copped directly from "Golden Slumbers"), sounds Star Wars-insipid next to Nelson's recent work.

On Sound-on-Sound, Bill Nelson's still dissecting utopia and its flip side. Now a full-fledged digital citizen where he once played the reluctant tourist, he pinpoints the day-to-day components of life in "The Atom Age" like an engineer disassembling a radio: psychosurgery, peer pressure, sex between androids, the mechanized bourgeoisie, artistic collusion. Recycling a panoply of neo-David Bowie vocal styles, he yelps his lyrics through a pounding, multilayered mass of sound in which guitars and synthesizers mesh like chain mail.

Red Noise's music has no empty spaces. Nelson plugs the gaps between words with funny noises, like the boing of an android with a screw loose or the nagging, out-of-sync drumming in the paranoid "Out of Touch." He even capers through a rare instrumental break by wielding an antic harmonica in the media-mocking "Stay Young." At their best — when they don't overpower the songs with gimmickry—such effects help bring Nelson's shots in on target. Whir-and-spin punctuation gives "Radar in My Heart," a two-minute robot romance, the proper sort of frenzied sincerity.

Aiming higher, Nelson—like Peter Hammill — preaches the antimechanistic gospel: "I'm all hooked up to every modern appliance/But I hang with the angels from the gallows of science." Yet this sermonizing is reminiscent of the way eighteenth-century novelists used slam-bang moralistic endings to justify the titillation in their texts. Bill Nelson's own loving use of technology belies the cynicism of his lyrics. "Art/Empire/Industry" has lines like "Colour is disruption/Uniforms are grey," but, paced by factory-line drum thunder and the swing of Ian Nelson's saxophone, it's so arch that it's joyous: a potential showstopping production number for a musical history of the Bauhaus. (RS 293)

DEBRA RAE COHEN