Now that Frankie has proven to be a remote-controlled sham with less depth (not to mention stage presence) than its sloganeering T-shirts, the gayrock mantle has fallen onto London's Bronski Beat, an unabashedly glad-to-be-gay synthesizer trio. Their impressive but uneven debut album offers several killer dance tracks powered by Jimmy Somerville's unique, piercing falsetto, but it also contains some painfully trite message lyrics and a campy selection of cover versions that undercuts the band's serious side. Evidently undecided as to their stance, the Bronskis alternate between intense, evocative chronicles about the challenges of being young and gay, and routine love-sex pieces no more enlightened than any macho heterosexual boast. Still, few bands have the courage to embrace a controversial topic, and these guys deserve credit: they neither exploit nor soft-pedal their gayness, they simply reflect it in song.

"Smalltown Boy" is a memorable tour de force, a powerful audio film about escaping provincial intolerance, made charming by an unpolished performance (note the tempo acceleration just before the first verse) and non-electronic-sounding synthesized minimalism. Somerville's winsome tale is convincing, and the ingenuous lyrics – if not quite James Baldwin prose – ring of truth and pain. "Junk" adopts a tense, urban urgency to deliver scowling lyrics about disposable culture; "Heatwave," a jazzy finger-popping number, features a brilliant, scat-laden vocal performance. "Why?," though a great high-energy song with just-right brass work by New York's Uptown Horns, suffers in spots from overly strident singing: one of this LP's problems is that Somerville's voice is best enjoyed in limited doses.

Besides often excellent songwriting, what makes The Age of Consent remarkable is the deceptively low-tech sound of the (uncredited and unspecified) electronic instruments. Bronski Beat hardly sounds like a synth band, and this modern dance record doesn't suffer from the pounding clichés of electro-disco. Under producer Mike Thorne, the variety of instrumental voices and arrangements sustains the album while remaining subordinate; clearly preeminent, Somerville's singing is the band's only consistent identifying feature.

Like the protagonist in "Smalltown Boy," Bronski Beat is young, uncertain and facing numerous challenges. Given their outspokenness and the disastrous record of topical bands, they'll have a thorny future, contending with bigotry as well as the immutable expectations of their audience. They are clearly an original talent, but only time will tell if they can remain true to their ideals and survive the confines of their advocacy. (RS 444)

IRA ROBBINS