Totally Hot review
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN: Totally Hot. Olivia Newton-John (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting; Talk to Me; Deeper Than the Night; Borrowed Time; A Little More Love; Never Enough; and four others. MCA MCA-3067 $7.98, MCAT-3067 $7.98, MCAC-3067 $7.98.
Performance: More like mild
Recording: Good
Let me put the title “Totally Hot” in perspective for you this way: if this were chili, the average Mexican would laugh it out of la comida. Actually, it’s the name of one of the songs (one of the dumber songs of the year), but there is the germ of something new about Olivia Newton-John’s approach here, and if you allow for the usual overstatement in these matters it makes some vague sort of sense.
She seems a little more ambitious this time out, having written a couple of the songs herself (they’re marginal, but the thought is what I’m talking about) and having been outfitted by producer John Farrar with rock-schlock instrumentals that seem pitched at someone a little older than her basic teenybopper constituency (not that anybody would object if two or three top-40 hits came out of it).
Whether any actual growth is occurring, as opposed to something merely different, is a harder question. The whole thing sounds so ardently middle-class that it may seem even shallower than it really is.
Olivia still seems to have a limited emotional range, and the songs here only approach but don’t answer the question of whether she could actually deliver a lyric that says something. This is a step in some direction for her, but I’ll be danged if I can figure out whether it’s a step forward or sideways.
N.C.