True Colors
Soundtrack
Tommy Boy Records

The True Colors Tour was the tour of the summer, with a queer-friendly line-up and a portion of the ticket money going to the GLBT-advocacy group Human Rights Campaign. If you missed the tour (which is entirely possible, as it only hit 16 cities across the country), there’s a soundtrack featuring most of the artists that appeared.

As tour souvenirs go, this CD could have been better. There are no pictures or live tracks from any of the shows, which rob the CD of any kind of you-are-there immediacy.

Beyond that hurdle, the True Colors soundtrack is an enjoyable affair. Some artists took the punk route with their contributions, like the Gossip’s rather muddy “(Take Back) The Revolution” or a straight-ahead rock route with the Cliks’ “Oh Yeah” and the Indigo Girls’ “Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven’s Gate.”

Rufus Wainwright went introspective with beautifully somber “Gay Messiah.” Debbie Harry tried to go in the same direction with the glossy “What is Love,” but the track makes one wish she would stick to the new wave she’s famous for.

The artists that truly save the day on this collection are the ones that crank out the party music, like Cyndi Lauper’s extended dance mix of “True Colors” and Erasure’s club-thumping remix of “Early Bird.” Jeffree Star and Cazwell follow suit in fine discotheque fashion with “Plastic Surgery Slumber Party” and “Watch My Mouth,” respectively.

Umlaut
Umlaut
Space Hooker Records

Imagine if Gary Numan and Kraftwerk produced offspring that was orphaned soon after birth, only to be whisked away Angelina Jolie-style and raised in the lap of luxury by surrogate parents ABBA and the Talking Heads on a spaceship. The result would be Philadelphia’s Umlaut.

Having formed just a year ago, Umlaut has its sonic territory staked out pretty well on its debut CD, sounding elitist and catchy at the same time. With their fetish for new-wave synth sounds forging an uneasy alliance with sparse punkish instrumentation, this quintet bounces confidently from pleasantly cheesy space-age euro-pop on tracks like “Drunken Love Song” and “Love on the DDR” to art-house garage rock on tracks like “When I’m Alone” and “Force of Nature.”

If you need some alien strangeness playing in the background for your next martini bar social, seek out this disc.

Marc Almond
Stardom Road
Sanctuary Records Group

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s karaoke night at the Marc Almond Lounge. If you like two-for-one fuzzy navels and have ever wondered what one of the pioneers of kinky gothic synth-pop would sound like if he cast himself as the demon king of Muzak, tormenting listeners in elevator hell, this is your night.

A little harsh? Yes. But if you’re going to try to sell an entire album of covers of songs like “Dream Lover” and “Strangers in the Night” to the same people who slithered in and out of PVC pants and platform boots to the beat of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” back in the day, there had better be some serious vocal or instrumental chops involved.

This is where Almond’s new album, “Stardom Road,” rips its fishnets. The instrumentation on this album is torture-grade generic and suffers from very sterile-sounding disco-era string and horn orchestration.

This is not an obstacle that couldn’t be overcome, but it’s compounded by the fact that Almond doesn’t sell a lot of the songs with his delivery. He doesn’t seem to be invested in any of the vocal performances except for the peppy “Kitsch.” Singers with stronger or more distinctive voices like Tom Jones or Tony Bennett could have saved a few of these numbers and probably would have panties (maybe a few jockstraps too) flying toward the stage. But Almond, for the most part, doesn’t put his back into the songs like he should.