On their first three albums, Ultravox proved themselves the first, as well as the best, of the robot rockers. Ex-lead singer John Foxx' lyrics defined a distinctive, post-David Bowie sensibility of machine-age attenuation that admirers like Gary Numan soon simplified and undermined in the course of imitating.

On Vienna, their first LP without Foxx, Ultravox, too, seem reduced to mimicking their earlier achievements. Ace popster Midge Ure, who's taken over leadership of the group, packs such tunes as "New Europeans" and the lyrical "Passing Strangers" with easy hooks, but his mannered vocals protest alienation without embodying it. Here, the band simply runs up the flag of significance by utilizing bombast: overblown arrangements, familiar and banal electronic effects. The results sound less like Ultravox' old mechanized enervation than the more-is-more "progressivism" of, say, the Moody Blues–anachronistic, pretentious and worn. (RS 338)

DEBRA RAE COHEN