"That's What Friends are For," the main draw of Dionne Warwick's thirty-third album, is the kind of refreshing, multi-chart hit that surfaces about once a year. Its honest, well-meaning clichés and uncluttered vocal exchanges between Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Gladys Knight, sung for the benefit of AIDS research, give the song a charismatic simplicity at a time when even the ballads on the radio have a high-tech chill to them. Just the fact that it's brought Warwick and Knight, two timeless but of late commercially inviable singers, back to the top of the charts makes it hard not to root for.

The rest of Friends, however, reveals just how emotionally and musically bereft Warwick's milieu – MOR and adult-contemporary radio – has become. Even with a lineup that includes Burt Bacharach, Stevie Wonder, Albhy Galuten, David Foster, Barry Manilow and Narada Michael Walden behind the boards, there's barely a hook, much less a song, worthy of Warwick's regal pipes. Her voice still sounds as full-bodied and lithe as ever, but with only a handful of memorable tracks to show for the last decade of her career, she must finally start to bear some of the blame herself, if for nothing else than her choice of uninspired material.

The reunion with Bacharach is especially disappointing. His five songs are the most he's done with Warwick since he and Hal David wrote and produced a string of classics for her in the Sixties. Now Bacharach is stuck with an inferior lyricist in wife Carole Bayer Sager (who is to David what Reader's Digest is to Dickens), and his songs have taken on a uniform blandness, lacking any of the mellifluous turns and thrilling crescendos that were once his trademark.

Only Stevie Wonder realizes that a fleshed-out singer like Warwick needs a fleshed-out song, which he contributes in "Moments Aren't Moments," a leftover from The Woman in Red soundtrack. He crams a lot of melody into a gently swaying rhythm that draws Warwick into effortless flight. It reminds us that Warwick, like only a few singers in her league (Dusty Springfield, the late Karen Carpenter), can convincingly straddle the lines of pop and rock.

The remainder of the album leaves Warwick swimming in sludge, in no apparent hurry to get out, and dependent upon superstar liaisons to get her on the radio. While it's true that she did land a big one in "That's What Friends Are For," it's also ironic, because her performance isn't even the best on it; that distinction belongs to Gladys Knight, who brings the song home after polite turns by Warwick, Wonder and John. As good as it is to see Dionne Warwick back on top again, Friends amounts to little more than a celebration of celebrity. (RS 470)

ROB HOERBURGER