Last year, Bronski Beat's debut LP gave gay consciousness the musical voice it always deserved. Anyone could get off on the band's brilliantly propulsive sound, but at root this was music by gay people, about gay people – and the best of its kind ever made. That's why its most significant score was in the gay bars and dance clubs it dominated all year. Jimmy Somerville's falsetto, especially,...

Now that Frankie has proven to be a remote-controlled sham with less depth (not to mention stage presence) than its sloganeering T-shirts, the gayrock mantle has fallen onto London's Bronski Beat, an unabashedly glad-to-be-gay synthesizer trio. Their impressive but uneven debut album offers several killer dance tracks powered by Jimmy Somerville's unique, piercing falsetto, but it also contains...