Judging from his interviews, the most amazing thing about Gary Numan is that he doesn't consider his mechanized, synthesizer-based music futuristic or robotic at all: it's just the pop music he hears in his head. Which means he's weirder than we thought.

Numan portrays the life of an everyday English kid or an average modern pop star in terms of imminent mortality, evanescence and ineffable sadness. The closest thing to a love song on Telekon is its opener, whose chorus goes: "This wreckage I call me/Would like to meet you." The album's final cut, "The Joy Circuit," describes a society so devoid of emotion you have to be strapped into a machine to have a little fun. Still, our Gary can't get into it: "But all I find is a reason to die."

Such unrelieved misery would be comical if it weren't also disturbing. Scarcely out of his adolescent years, Gary Numan is already, in terms of attitude, the Samuel Beckett of British New Wave. On Telekon, however, his despondent sentiments are attached to the most wistfully beautiful music he's yet created. There's much less mindless repetition, swelled-up organ playing and automatic rhythms, and much more quiet, Eno-esque contemplativeness. "I Dream of Wires," the story of the last electrician on earth, and "Please Push No More" are particularly haunting. (RS 340)

DON SHEWEY