ROCK-POP

Neil Young: ''Trans.'' (Geffen GHS 2018.) Young was already a hero when he split from Buffalo Springfield in the late '60s. Since then he has had some hits as well as trend-setting albums. This record is a confident attempt at a new genre for Young - electronic music. However, Young took us one step too far: He used a device called a Vocoder, which distorts the voice beyond recognition. This makes several of the album's potentially good songs sound as if sung by a computer. The Vocoder helps the song ''We R In Control,'' as a computer tells us what he-she runs in the world, but overall it is overused on the record. Some of the cuts were saved from the 'computer,' such as the bouncy country-pop ''Little Thing Called Love'' and the smooth, Latin-flavored ''Like an Inca.'' The message the album is sending us is disturbing, as songs like ''Computer Cowboy'' and ''Computer Age'' paint a picture of the world in the hands of the computer. Whatever his objectives, Neil Young has come up with an unusual - and different - album, one which may have even the biggest Young fans asking: ''What Happened?''