It took Bette Midler two and a half years to make her third album. But all Songs for the New Depression does is once again raise the question of how this gifted stage personality can capture on a record the ebullience, spontaneity and imagination of her performances. Clearly, as her selection of good, recent songs by Bob Dylan. Tom Waits, Nick Holmes and Phoebe Snow indicates, Midler wishes to be regarded as a versatile recording artist of mostly contemporary material as well as a popular entertainer. Yet these are the wrong songs sung poorly. Midler sounds so tense and intimidated by studio problems that her personality is scarcely evident on this album. Ultimately, Songs for the New Depression is a failure because it comes to life only in its trivial endeavors, which is exactly what wasn't supposed to happen.

The cover portrays Midler rejecting her "Divine Miss M" persona in order to move in a new direction. But the album itself suggests confusion; Midler inexplicably submits to arrangements and production values that strut their own cleverness rather than showcase her talents. Producer Moogy Klingman undermines Midler's gift for dramatic monologue either by echoing or multitracking her vocals in arrangements as stiff as they are misconceived. An abridged version of Phoebe Snow's "I Don't Want the Night to End," set as an R&B ballad of sorts, drowns Midler's individuality in echoes, while the arrangement turns an excellent song into bathetic schlock. Tom Waits's "Shiver Me Timbers," a high point in Midler's live act, sinks under the weight of an arrangement so literal-minded that it includes the sound of mewing sea gulls. The Fifties hit "Tragedy," with expansive choral backup and chimes, is neither spoof nor tear-jerker.

Along with the totally misguided attempt at reggae ("No Jestering"), the album's excruciating nadir is a disco version of "Strangers in the Night" (produced by Arif Mardin in a style similar to the Bee Gees' "Fanny"), in which Midler shrieks about a half-tone flat from beginning to end. In more relaxed settings, Midler's severe pitch problems can be overlooked—indeed, they can serve her dramatic style, as in "Hello in There." But it seems the height of stubborn self-destructiveness for Midler to ape Gloria Gaynor, fall short so badly and then allow the result to stand.

Midler sounds relaxed only in the two cuts she coproduced with Joel Dorn, whose previous work with her has been her best. A revival of the Patti Page hit "Old Cape Cod" is comfortably nostalgic. On "Marahuana," an obscure Thirties film tune, Midler camps it up a la Carmen Miranda to re-create the period piece in her own image. Though a very trivial song, it's at least fun.

On Midler's duet with Dylan on a lyrically revised "Buckets of Rain," Dylan's backup vocal is unaccountably mixed much higher than the lead; the song sounds like a Dylan self-parody. Midler's own attempts at writing—a phone-call song to "Mr. Rockefeller" and her humorous interpretation of the "Welcome to My Nightmare" slogan in "Samedi et Vendredi" (sung entirely in French)—will at least appeal to Midler's claque. Both pieces, however, are closer to show-biz bits than to fully realized songs, and Klingman's production again fails to enhance their humor.

Trivia, nostalgia and camp may validate and sustain the worth of a stage career, but they sure as hell can't do it for a singing career that asks to be taken seriously. (RS 208)

STEPHEN HOLDEN