There are a million ways to say "I love you" in pop music, and Martin Fry, the singer and leader of ABC, has managed to cram many of them onto this dazzling debut album. Fry, who wears his heart on his silk shirt sleeve like a giant diamond cuff link, flashes a Phil Spector-like armada of horns, synthesizers, strings, percussion and backup sirens as he compiles a pumping disco dictionary of sordid...

Is ABC jumping on the heavy-metal bandwagon, or has Martin Fry, the band's singer-leader, just taken leave of his senses? Whatever the reason, ABC's self-produced Beauty Stab is an album of maddeningly unequal parts and a playground for Fry's peculiarly didactic lyrical conceits and the band's unchecked musical indulgences. Kicking off with "That Was Then but This Is Now," Fry stirs up some...

As Edison might have put it, most great disco is one-percent inspiration, ninety-nine-percent perspiration. Its unguarded vulgarity is what puts it over – "I'm not the same/I have no shame," Madonna sang on her first record. What's held back the artsy British synth technicians who've been aping disco moves over the last decade isn't their narcissism or irony as much as their tasteful fear of...