The two guys who make up New York electro stylists Fischerspooner – Casey Spooner and Warren Fischer – are both wink-and-nudge ironists and daft punk nostalgists. These NYC art-school posers are the leading luminaries in the new, hipster-elite electroclash movement, a movement that’s really just a throwback to early/mid-’80s synth-pop. Fischerspooner are one of those bands whose live shows – glammed out performance spectacles featuring costumes more outlandish than anything Cher could imagine – are better known than the actual music.

Which may possibly be because Fischerspooner don’t write what you could actually call songs. Instead, what they do is string together bloodless, chintzy sci-fi beats into chains of pretentious “musical” insincerity. This is the kind of music for those trendy fashionista types think taste involves a wash of glitter and style instead of substance.

“#1,” their major label debut, has everything you’d expect: burping synths and tinny, aloof drum pulses; a singer (Spooner) whose pallor gives him the sound of an indulgent vampire. The music, on the other hand, isn’t very memorable. Unlike early forebears – such as Soft Cell, whose “Tainted Love” is still fondly remembered – the songs of Fischerspooner have a glaring lack of hooks. The so-called “songs” are muddled, bland hodgepodges of aimlessly throbbing techno-art blips.

Songs like “Emerge” are finding places on the dance music charts, yet it’s hard to see how the stiff rhythms and muddy syncopation could burn up the dance floors. Indeed, neither the lethargic bleating of “Sweetness” nor the goofy ping-pongs on “Invisible” seem like the kinds of songs that get pulses racing.

Despite their concessions to the sniffling Manhattan glitterati, Fischerspooner’s beats tend to skew simplistic and repetitive. These are strictly kindergarten level beats; “#1” displays all the sonic complexity of a Spice Girls track doing Ecstasy.

There is one song on “#1” that rises above Fischerspooner’s affected, cheesy murk. “Tone Poem” is a minimalist whisper that seems almost at odds with the rest of the empty flash here. The stark landscapes sound better than the vapid, shiny stuff surrounding them. “Tone Deaf” is the kind of airy, flowing song destined to be rejected by the same people who think the mannered electroclash of the rest of “#1” is the epitome of hip. But “#1” isn’t the epitome of hip; it’s the epitome of shrill faddism.