Perversely High Tech

By GIL GRIFFIN

PERFORMER: JESUS JONES

ALBUM: PERVERSE

LABEL: FOOD/SBK/ERG

THE BOTTOM LINE: A dance-rock band switches gears, making a techno album as smart as it is danceable.

When he sings "This time the revolution will be computerized," on the song Zeroes and Ones, Mike Edwards is not kidding. Jesus Jones -- the British quintet that Edwards fronts -- has chucked the rock guitars, horns, pop-dance beats and radio-friendly hooks that two years ago helped it sell 2 million copies of its album Doubt. Instead the group has plugged its keyboards, synthesizers and drum machines into digital samplers and computers.

The result is a buzzing, throbbing, state-of-the-art "techno" album sure to give any rave partygoer flashbacks of delirious all-night dancing in smoky, jam-packed warehouses. But unlike most techno music, Perverse is rather perverse about the electronic age: with lucid and ironic lyrics that lurk beneath the surface maelstrom, it examines politics, pop culture, love and hypocrisy in a world that has become overly high tech.

In Magazine, for example, sung in an arid yet passionate rasp, Edwards muses on how literary works have been replaced on people's bookshelves by visually slick magazines featuring everything "from the absurd to the obscene." The haunting, slow-tempo Yellow Brown recalls the cyberpunk film Blade Runner; synthesizer bass notes drip like fat raindrops, and the sounds of droning machinery resonate. Edwards laments ecological destruction caused by technology: "In the city air, in all our seas, you can see every other color bleed into/ Yellow brown. There's nothing to save us from ourselves."

The group can look on the light side too. Get a Good Thing turns out to be a ringing endorsement for living for the moment, guilt free. Currently, The Devil You Know, a danceable slammer about the conflict between living for the moment and living pragmatically, is being played in heavy rotation on college radio stations. Though the lyrics are cryptic, one could interpret Edwards' words as a message about the danger of promiscuity in the age of AIDS. But other songs, like the politically charged The Right Decision, are far more alluring. Here Edwards makes a commentary on hypocrisy, with thinly veiled references to the Gulf War and the Rodney King trial. He concludes, "There is no such thing in the world as the right decision," especially for a politician.

Edwards' lyrics on that song underscore a major point of Perverse: people, with all their complexities, are increasingly confused as the world has become chaotic. The pop-music scene is also chaotic, as trends come and go. By breaking from the pack and making the radically different, high-tech Perverse, Jesus Jones has taken that trend and advanced it.