Ever since the Who and the Stones, if not the Revolutionary War, uppity British ironists have made a habit of "elevating" vulgar American pop crazes into high concept. This can get annoying, especially since their disco singers usually stink and their bratty young upstarts are always straining too hard. But when sounds on these shores get too sure of themselves, as house music and rap have done lately, limeys with tongues in cheeks can serve as bridges to some higher plane.

Though Pop Will Eat Itself's Cure for Sanity sounds pretty vapid when the band tries to rap or think (lots of nonsense about overthrowing civilization and stuff), that doesn't halt its electronic flow. These twerps are virtuosos when it comes to machine and movie noises. The U.K. smash "Touched By the Hand of Cicciolina" may well be intended as a tribute to a porn actress and the World Cup, but what you hear are sportscasters, keyboard players and opera divas dancing on clouds. Pretend the monotones are nothing more than instruments, tune out the poetry, and you've got yourself a pleasant afternoon.

Even more than PWEI, Malcolm McLaren wants to cut high culture down to size so we can roll around in its schmaltz and its beauty. Ever since he helped invent punk, he's been raping and pillaging Americana (and Braziliana and Africana and so on) so reckessly that if you get perturbed with him, you're just playing into his sand trap. On Round the Outside! Round the Outside! (overseen by Malc, performed by the World Famous Supreme Team Show), he might even be onto something. As pure sound, the mesh of moaning arias in "Diva Loves Operaa House!" can match anything by the Pet Shop Boys. And the centerpiece suite, "II Be or Not II Be" "Romeo and Juliet" "Wherefor Art Thou?" bolstered by massed bass lumps out of the Police's "Voices Inside My Head" sets the stage for the hip-hop Twelfth Night (starring M.C. Lyte) now being readied for Broadway.

The apparent role model for Round the Outside! is Alec R. Costandinos and the Synchophonic Orchestra's Romeo and Juliet, a lost 1978 classic first responsible for mixing sex gasps with galactic Euro-disco strings. But McLaren's recipe adds hypnotic soul chants and piano breaks, hokey unity pleas, salsa and umbaqanga steals, radio-talk-show tapes and "Spanish Harlem" to the shameless stew. His female rappers go sweet and sour like Neneh Cherry, and Neneh's own "Buffalo Stance" pokes out of a new version of his 1983 hip-hop-and-square-dance hybrid "Buffalo Gals."

Cheerfully redundant, with playful and personable songs to go with the cool beats and none of the New Age and retro ills that kill so much current club music on contact, Round the Outside! is the rare house album that doesn't seem like the work of ciphers. When I let myself forget that what it's really about is some old fraud trying to swindle us out of a few more shekels, I enjoy it even more. (RS 602)

CHUCK EDDY