POP MUSIC REVIEW : SPUTNIK BLASTS OFF BUT GOES AWRY

For a band that’s all concept and strategy, Sigue Sigue Sputnik doesn’t have its timing down very well. Whatever interest there might have been a few months ago in the group’s flashy rhetoric about image and marketing has dissipated, and the English group’s first American tour is taking place in something of a vacuum.

The band’s album “Flaunt It” has been resoundingly ignored on both mainstream and alternative charts, and the audience for Sputnik’s show Tuesday at the Palace seemed more curious than committed--it even had to be prodded into making enough noise for an encore.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik isn’t trying just to make a comment on commerce--it’s trying to be the comment. But the band turned out to be a high-concept, low-yield item that makes a familiar mistake: thinking that theories and image can compensate for lame music. You still have to come up with sounds people can care about, and without them the band’s performance Tuesday was basically a video quick-fix.

The six glam-rock peacocks were easily overshadowed by their hardware--two huge walls of flashing television monitors behind them and two giant screens above. Bolstering its “designer violence” slogan with clips from “Rollerball” and “Blade Runner,” personifying the U.S.A. as Bronson and Eastwood, S.S.S. tried to transcend pop-culture cliches by wallowing in them. Didn’t work.

Similarly, the music is deliberately banal, consisting of riffs recycled from various rock eras and repeated with numbing lack of variation. They emerged more as fragments than songs, and the band exposed its musical haplessness when trying to negotiate snappy rhythm breaks.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik owes a debt to earlier pop tacticians like Malcolm McLaren, Devo and the Plasmatics, to name just a few, but the band’s cynicism is so sour and self-absorbed that it makes those precursors seem downright magnanimous.