BY STEVEN ROSEN

Featuring Human League, Belinda Carlisle, ABC, A Flock of Seagulls, Naked Eyes... For some reason, many of us keep feeling fascination for the bleating, catchy synthesizer pop of the early 1980s, a style of music closely affiliated with MTV's early days and the promise of British New Wave to modernize the dull, meat-and-potatoes American guitar rock of the day.

Nowadays, consensus seems to be, New Wave's only appeal is as nostalgia - it was too gimmicky, stylized and commercially compromised to hold up against the punk-inspired music that was emerging at the same time from bands not photogenic enough to become MTV stars. And the Regeneration Tour, which worked its way across the U.S. and Mexico during August, has been playing up the guilty-pleasure nostalgia angle. Maybe it's working elsewhere, but in Cincinnati it drew a couple hundred people to a covered outdoor amphitheater (with great acoustics, incidentally) that can hold 4,000.

A shame, in a way. While several of the acts - Naked Eyes ("Promises, Promises") and a ragged A Flock of Seagulls, whose synthesizer player/vocalist Mike Score no longer has that fantastic tidal wave of a haircut - are better remembered than actually heard these days - ABC and Human League made a compelling case for the quality of their music. Somewhere in between was Belinda Carlisle, whose stage presence was energetic and voice strong, but whose songs mostly are bland and uninteresting, hiding a lack of tunefulness in their big sound. She's lucky to still have her cluster of rousing, concise Go-Gos hits - "We Got the Beat," "Our Lips Are Sealed," "Vacation" - to perform live to keep things mildly peppy.

ABC now is lead singer Martin Fry and a younger band. At 50, the graying Fry is a dapper, debonair and distinctive lead singer, with an expressively gritty croon that can be favorably compared with Bowie and Bryan Ferry. So, too, can his wardrobe - a very hip-looking, nicely tailored orange suit over a black shirt. He started with a good but unfamiliar song from the new ABC album, Traffic, before launching into ABC's early-1980s repertoire of ebulliently romantic, irresistible pop songs with prickly lyrics and melodies - "Poison Arrow," "How to Be a Millionaire," "All of My Heart," "Be Near Me" and "When Smokey Sings."

These tunes have both a sense of humor (who else can sing "Yippee-I-Ay" during a love song) and real grandeur, which distinguishes them from both run-of-the-mill New Wave and most pop today. With its range and ebullient power intact, his voice easily brought these songs back to life. And it was hard not to laugh and simultaneously be touched when, on the closing "Look of Love," he deadpanned on the spoken-word section - "My friends still ask me, 25 years later, Martin maybe you'll find true love..."

Human League's presence was like a Robert Wilson or John Adams modernist music-theater piece. Or, like Kraftwerk meets Prada. Gleaming-white synthesizers and a Linn drum set were placed across the stage, each on its own platform, while the colored ceiling lights kept moving and flashing, sometimes blinding the audience. A screen flashed high-definition-video images. The musicians, dressed in black, took their appropriate places - with multi-instrumentalist Nic Burke sometimes stepping forward to play his synthesized keytar.

And while suggestively dressed singers Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley took their place up front, lead vocalist Philip Oakey at first seemed like a prowling Nosferatu as he tromped about the stage with shaved head, sunglasses, and long silvery trench coat. His deep voice was a growl, but like Leonard Cohen's it is not soulless or robotic, as he has been criticized in the past. As he shed some of layers of his costume during the show, he also became genuinely friendly with the audience - although there's something surreal about hearing this band shout out "Hello, Cincinnati!"

In Europe, Human League has toured doing its 1981 synth-washed dance-pop album Dare start-to-finish, like a complete work of art. This set-up didn't allow for that, but those Dare songs do hold up - not just the megahit "Don't You Want Me" and "Love Action," but also the darker, more political material, like "Seconds," about Lee Harvey Oswald. ("We're a pop band, but we do have some serious songs," Oakey explained. "This one is about the assassination of President Kennedy.") Other songs, like "Heart Like a Wheel" and "Together in Electric Dreams," were brighter. For a band that struggled with material after its initial success, and as a result doesn't have a very extensive songbook of familiar songs, the set's musicality held up well.

Yet, Human League may have been a little too arty-conceptual for a shortened set on a package tour - they should maybe be playing their own shows in concert halls, or at least sharing a bill with kindred spirits Pet Shop Boys. I heard several people afterward saying they didn't much like it, except for the straightforward ballad written for the band by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, "Human." That's a shame. Human League's musical vision holds up.