Through attrition, the Starship has dwindled down to one original member, guitarist Craig Chaquico, picking up faceless new recruits to replace those who departed, weary of the band's bloodless and dull "rock radio" sound. Though the Starship has managed a few unmemorable hits, it has been hopelessly adrift in a galaxy of mediocrity. With Love Among the Cannibals, the band has at last been swallowed up by a black hole from which no decent music is allowed to escape.

The Starship may sing about heavenly bodies, but the music it makes sounds like a guided tour of hell. It's all graceless, computer-generated clomping and whomping: sampled rock noise crowned by Mickey Thomas's choirboy wail. The torture starts with track one, "The Burn," with Thomas's massively echoed voice repeating the perplexing line "Bad is better than the burn" over and over against what sounds like backward drumrolls and a fulsome wall of sound that would send Phil Spector reaching for the extra-strength pain reliever. By the end of the album, you realize how limited the world of hightech musical gadgetry is when it's divorced from human imagination.

Lost for an identity, wanting airplay above all, Starship comes across as a poor man's Boston (or an even poorer man's Loverboy). Generically irritating rock like this evokes a whole panorama of late-Eighties cultural mundanity in the land of the free: the antiseptic malls, where it is piped into the Orwellian tape and CD shops; the crowded urban thoroughfares, where junk like Love Among the Cannibals comes blasting out of speeding cars and pickup trucks driven by scowling teenagers and unemployed weedheads; the anesthetized suburbs, where kids blare tapes in their bedroom fortresses, driving parents to distraction. The lowest common denominator gets lower every year, and this latest slab of product from the Starship hits rock bottom. (RS 563)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH