Formula for success: Take a pleasantly colorless female singer, and give her a catchy ditty bland enough for the easy-listening stations, slightly countrified for C&W radio, with a nagging bass-voice hook for Top 40. Result: "Let Me Be There" by Olivia Newton-John, Top Five Country, Top Ten Pop. Next single? Same bass voice, same carefully tailored across-the-board appeal — same results for "If You Love Me, Let Me Know." New album contains natural followup. "The River's Too Wide" has that same built-in country/pop crossover quality. This time the hook's an unaccompanied, handclapping, triple-tracked chorus. It'll catch your attention the first few times you hear it, and will then become just as ceaselessly irritating a radio presence as its two predecessors.

Producer John Farrar's ultracommercial craftsmanship can't be faulted. Nor can Olivia Newton-John herself—she demonstrates a tremulous vocal appeal on many of the tracks, making her album surprisingly pleasant listening. But it's a disheartening state of affairs when Top 40 hits are programmed for a 25-to-35, middle-of-the-road audience, when country music virtually merges with "soft-rock" and when radio sounds so innocuously homogenized. Olivia Newton-John is merely supplying a demand — immaculately bland radio fodder for the sedated Seventies. (RS 168)

KEN BARNES