In a country where what you say about pop music is often more important than what you say with it, Welcome to the PleasureDome – this Liverpool quintet's extravagant double-album debut – is the ultimate victory of mercenary style over substance, a work of extraordinary studio imagination and perverse commercial ambition dedicated to the elevation of hip agitprop and homoerotic self-absorption. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a pleasure dome e-e-e-rect!" exclaims singer Holly Johnson in "Welcome to the Pleasure Dome," taking no small liberties with Coleridge's poem. Like a riverboat card shark, producer Trevor Horn shuffles the band's tribal grunts, orgasmic fuzz guitars and slamming-car-door drums above an evil-sounding strolling bass line. Compared to this, Boy George is just a cross-dresser with a heart of gold, the Human League a tinkertoy Pink Floyd.

In fact, Welcome to the PleasureDome is a kind of Bright Side of the Moon, an ingenious application by Horn of new dance-remix techniques and overhauled art-rock maneuvers. Frankie's "Relax" and the doomsday boogie alert "Two Tribes" (both included here) are insidiously smart pop driven by the sense of frantic motion Horn creates by slipping instruments and whole environments in and out at whiplash speed. The album's best moments – the provocative expansion of Edwin Starr's Motown protest classic, "War," with its spooky ticktock chorus and creepy synth gloss; the racy funk of "Krisco Kisses," with its jungle-boogie drums and galloping bass climaxing in a satisfied moan – heighten the vertigo, flipping you around with a symphonic ferocity rooted in good dance-floor sense.

The main problem with PleasureDome is the songs holding it up. Too often they are merely alluring fragments, like Brian Nash's whirlpool guitar motif in "Two Tribes" and Johnson's ecstatic come-on in the title track. "Wish (the Lads Were Here)" just gets up a good head of disco steam when it suddenly brakes into a trivial saun-pillow instrumental with slinky lead guitar. And the straight covers of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run," which inexplicably substitutes a groggy bass solo for Clarence Clemons' roaring sax break, and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" are pointless: smug mimicry devoid of either satire or sincerity.

Yet, it revels in its own subversiveness with such audacious glee that it is impossible not to be captivated, if not entirely convinced, by Welcome to the PleasureDome. "The world is my oyster," cackles a Frankie arrogantly at the beginning of the album. Certainly Trevor Horn has constructed a marvelous shell. But the pearls are spread thinly over PleasureDome's four sides. The shine, it seems, is mostly outside. (RS 439)

DAVID FRICKE