Thomas Dolby's The Golden Age of Wireless is one of the most impressive debuts so far this year. Dolby, who played on Foreigner IV and wrote "New Toy" for Lene Lovich, takes after the Bowie side of Gary Numan. Even his most enigmatic songs ("Leipzig," "Radio Silence") have Bowie's substance and narrative completion. Yet he manipulates studio hardware with Numan's eerie familiarity. Several tracks have a submerged, barely audible layer of almost random sound that serves as a constant (and disturbing) subtext, occasionally erupting into the song – like the descending quintet of notes that interrupts the melody of "Weightless" whenever "the empty feeling" is mentioned. This sonic underworld is all part of Dolby's mechanical wizardry; one can imagine him as a boy genius alone in the basement with his tapes and wires and synths and rhythm machines, making this dense, dazzling record and sticking in weird, subliminal noises to amuse himself.

The results are hardly hermetic. The jaunty pulse of "Europa and the Pirate Twins," in which a lad tries to contact a childhood friend who's now a celebrity, hooks you into the album immediately. "Windpower," "Radio Silence," and "Flying North" are as irresistibly melodic as Paul McCartney's work. And unlike many synthesizer bands from England, Dolby eschews morbid, droogy drones. "Cloudburst at Shingle Street," the possibly apocalyptic number that closes the album, faces annihilation with a vision that is positively ecstatic. (RS 380)

DON SHEWEY