There's a big, well, it's a warning label really, on the back of this CD's case, which in type much larger than any elsewhere on the package declares: "Head-phone music for three dimensions." I took the hint, and before doing anything else with it, I recorded the CD to minidisc so I could experience it through headphones, in the three dimensions of my bus ride to work. In a small act of rebellion against the album's title, I selected a pastel pink Hello Kitty minidisc, thinking "Take that, Pretentious!" and "Ohhh, I'll get you Vincent Clarke." Little did I know it at the time, but this album didn't really need my help-- it spends a good deal of its time taking the piss out of itself.

So here's the deal: evidently, Pretentious is "the first-ever album to realise the potential of 3D soundscapes." Right, yeah, what they said. It was created, they tell me, using software called "Animax 3D", in conjunction with something known as a "Lake Huron" audio processor, all of which is specifically designed to create music for something called the "Soundscapes 3D Auditorium" which is housed in some other place named the "National Centre for Popular Music" which lies in some such place as "Sheffield", which I presume is in that region some refer to as "England." Again, all this is hearsay so far as I know, but it all gives me a certain sense of anticipation for the album -- I mean, with all those fancy names, and considering the headphone caveat, I think I can reasonably expect that this album is going to be pretty sweet.

Y'know, sweet. I want to put on my headphones and be startled into crying out -- surrounded by working stiffs on the bus -- "Dude, this is so SWEET!" And with all the fanfare, I'm fairly confident that this is going to happen, that somewhere between York and Gilpin streets I will feel the cuff of my pants being tugged by magickal 3D sprites, who amid much swooping and sweeping will take my hand and float me out through the bus window on a tour of the wondrous land of Animaxia, where booms and crashes wait to burst out at me from behind enchanted decay envelopes, and the secret tribe of the Nords will initiate me with a dizzying rite of crescendoing elephant and peacock noises which-- despite the evidence of my eyes, which plainly inform me of the complete lack of elephants and peacocks-- sound like they are just right fucking there, stomping about in my head, and in the midst of it all, the horrifying and vertiginous midst of it all, the leader of the Nords-- the Great Nord or whomever- the- fuck-- will lean towards me and whisper to me, only to me: "Dude, isn't this SWEET?"-- whereupon, unable to bear the cyclopean, debilitating SWEET-ness of it, I will slip gratefully into perfect, cinematic unconsciousness.

Well, with these apocryphal hopes I put on my headphones and prepared for the arrival of the sprites. You are not surprised to hear me say they never arrived. The action in my ears consisted of some predictable and far from earth-shattering pans from left to right. Perhaps my minidisc player is not Animax compliant. Perhaps my 'phones require an additional Soundscape serial bus. All I can tell you is that from where I sat, there was no sweetness. There was sweetlessness.

And in the absence of sweetness, all I can tell you about is the music. The music, as you might expect, runs the gamut from The Innocents to Abba-esque -- hitting all the micro-stylistic increments within that staggering range. The music is pretty much Erasure without Andy Bell-- and Andy is what gives Erasure the camp value to stay alive. On Pretentious, Vince Clarke and Martyn Ware serve up 70 minutes of passable, new-wavy dance-pop with the occasional bit of passable, new-wavy ambience. And it's just not enough to justify all the pomp-- although I guess it was enough to satisfy the National Centre for Popular Music, if it really exists.

After a week with Pretentious, here's what I'm wondering: are the staggering technological powers of Animax 3D and the Lake Huron processor real? And if they are, why not take them away from Vince and Martyn and give them to Rob Brown and Sean Booth, or Taylor Dupree, or Mike Paradinas, or Kevin Shields, or Tom Jenkinson, or Akifumi Nakajima, or Amon Tobin, or John Balance, or Steven Stapleton, or David Toop, or...

-Zach Hooker