Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" shot off its percussive guns on dance floors for some forty-three weeks last year, making it the single with the longest run ever on Billboard's chart. But that gem aside, the duo mainly makes weirdly lofty tracks that set Marc Almond's howlingly overwrought vocalizing to the varied electronic music of David Ball. Little of what Ball has come up with on the new album has any jump, though, and Almond, who tries to capture little moments of pathos with a social realist's eye, delivers his sad observations of ordinary lives with a silly grandness. Almond laments in "Numbers" how "you wake up one day and find that you're a number," and he pities the guy in "Forever the Same" who watches "life slip by on an assembly line." They tromp about like a grim anthropologist and his synthesizer sidekick, but this sort of moaning about the postindustrial world has gone on since the Twenties.

They do uncork one neat pop song here: with Ball throwing in a big, thumping beat, Almond trades in the theatrics for the smaller-scale emotions of "Loving You, Hating Me." It may be a hit, although the record buyer, as curiosity seeker, may be more interested in the included bonus EP's medley of "Hey Joe/Purple Haze/Voodoo Chile," an homage to Jimi Hendrix so awful one can only think again of tainted love. (RS 393)

DEBBY MILLER