Techno is music that gets on people's nerves. Whether pounding like metal or watercoloring like New Age, it strikes many as repetitive and cold, about as charming as a headache. It doesn't worry about stars or string sections or songs. What's more, it began its popular life in this country claiming, as those Belgian propagandists behind L.A. Style put it, that "James Brown Is Dead."

Of course, the genre isn't supernatural enough in its powers to kill funk. It does offer a new pop vocabulary, though. Techno Mancer, one of the sharpest of the many anthologies out now, provides a cross section of mostly uncut stuff. A decade ago, the electronic blips in Eccentric's "Outlaw" would have been underlaid by New Wave disco beats; in techno, the rhythm plows ahead, and those blips wind themselves up into an aggressive circuitry of sound. Pink Stanly Ford's "A New Style Baby" lurches back and forth even faster and harder; it's like speed metal for keyboard enthusiasts. Moods range from Lords of Acid's industrial-strength "Rough Sex" to Digital Orgasm's tie-dyed "Star-touchers," on which a reveling congregation insists that "we create a fantasy where people live in harmony." And a couple of tracks – Oxy's "The Feeling," with its samples of piano and vocal harmonies, and Jade 4 U's "Messenger of Love" – rely on some of pop's oldest beauty secrets.

Like Rozalla, the dance-club diva who on last year's Everybody's Free presented herself as a dreadlocked version of Sade set on feeling good, Utah Saints aren't purists. But where Rozalla applies techno touches to dance tunes, Jez Willis and Tim Garbutt sport ravey haircuts and look like DJs. Consistently, on their debut, Utah Saints, they avoid both the knottier and more numbing aspects of techno. They ensure that rock ears ready for a new spin can follow this music's instrumental conventions.

After sampling such varied artists as Kate Bush on "Something Good," Slayer on "I Want You" and Annie Lennox on "What Can You Do for Me," the duo becomes even more impressive. Tunes like "Solution" and "States of Mind" – not to mention a disco-dub extravaganza called "My Mind Must Be Free" – manage something hard to do: They smooth out techno without diluting it. On Utah Saints, everything's there – the crowd noises, the disembodied voices, the insane-parrot riffs, the icy tones. But Utah Saints magnify the crowds into stadium roars, snazz up the vocal bits into hooks and play the microchip perfection off against good old-fashioned distortion and noise. They even restore notes that your ear naturally craves but that techno die-hards leave out in the interest of antipop starkness. The result? Techno sensations suitable for everyday people – not an annoying trick at all. (RS 648)

JAMES HUNTER