Thanks to a hit single and a smooth promotional campaign, Three Dog Night is quickly becoming a name group. Judging by their latest album, whatever success this group has achieved is largely undeserved.

Mediocrity and lack of imagination characterize everything Three Dog Night does. They play it safe all the way. Having almost no original material of their own, they pick up on proven winners by other artists (like "Try a Little Tenderness" and "Don't Make Promises" from their first album, "Feelin' Alright?" and "A Change is Gonna Come" on this one), and they trivialize the material with a style suitable for performance on Hugh Hefner's variety show, on which Three Dog Night is a regular attraction. Take their job on "A Change is Gonna Come." Aretha and Otis both produced moving versions of this song, partly because they conceived of it as an opportunity for paying respect to Sam Cooke. But when Three Dog Night does it, in a technically competent but uninteresting manner, the only rationale seems to be a shortage of material.

Three Dog Night's claim to fame is that they have three lead singers—Danny Hutton, Chuck Negron, and Corry Wells. You'd think that purely by chance one of the three would turn out to be an interesting vocalist, but such is not the case. The only real consequence of the group having three different vocalists is that the listener can be bored in three different ways.

The first track of the album, a wretched version of "Feelin' Alright?" makes this apparent. Chuck Negron, singing lead, enunciates each word carefully, almost painfully, as if he were trying to impress a high school English teacher. Hutton and Wells chime in first with some dull harmonizing, and then with a grating dit-dit-dit-dit-dit routine. The whole thing is reminiscent of Three Dog Night's earlier rape job on "Try a Little Tenderness."

While the vocals by Negron and Hutton are relatively inoffensive, Corry Wells' singing is irritating. On several cuts he assumes the posture of an R&B singer. He shouts and groans at the end of "Eli's Coming." He throws in "gotta," "huh," and "alright" at all the proper places in "Ain't That a Lotta Love." It all comes out synthetic—rhythm blues by rote learning.

The four musicians who compose the rest of Three Dog Night are competent, and even, in scattered moments (as on "Lady Samantha") interesting. But in general, mediocrity pervades the group's music as it does its vocals and its choice of material. Taking no chances as usual, Three Dog Night employs a horn section, borrowed from the Chicago Transit Authority, on several tracks. The use of horns turns out to be as pointless as everything else. "Celebrate," the final track on the album, provides the horn section with its big moment—but the attempt at a driving finish merely sounds blaring.

Sadly enough, all this mediocrity pays off. It's already produced a hit single, "One"; it's likely to produce more. But who knows; Three Dog Night might improve. Someday they might even reach the aesthetic level of the Grass Roots. (RS 40)

BRUCE MIROFF