*1/2 PURE SUGAR

(Geffen)

What's the point of creating 20-year-old disco music when the original 20-year-old disco music already exists? Still, if you liked the remakes of King Kong and Godzilla, you might find something to like in these tracks. Pure Sugar use too many of original disco's best-known sound effects, rely on infallibly familiar arrangements, and offer too much songcraft and too little rhythm on their debut CD. As for Jennifer Starr's power singing, self-conscious to the max (nearly diva in "The Feeling' 98," carefully cute in "Got To Be Love"), why do Taylor Dayne when Taylor Dayne's already done it? Lorimer and Vission, the creators of Pure Sugar, quote Chic and D Train in "These Are the Times," a nice touch. But Starr's skim-surface singing deflates the feeling. As for "Very Cherry," it's a hard-house track that almost works -- until you compare its lack of dialogue between rhythm and voice to the real rhythm-and-voice stuff on Danny Tenaglia's Tourism CD, for example.

-- Michael Freedberg