Totally Hot review
Totally Hot By Olivia Newton-John с 1978 MCA Records MCA 3067
It should come as no surprise that Olivia Newton-John’s new album is called Totally Hot. The platinum singles from the Grease soundtrack album have kept her on top of international charts months.
Since she arrived in the United States in 1973, Newton-John’s appeal as songstress/seductress has remained constant. The picture of Newton-John on the Totally Hot cover is sure to attract in-store buyers even though the packaging seems to be pitched to the adolescent mentality.
Physical gifts and cultivated beauty aside, Newton-John can sing. She rocks like Ronstadt although Newton-John’s voice isn’t as full bodied or powerful as her southern California neighbor. Throughout the album, Newton-John shrieks, shouts and melodically sings with the naive spirit of an overly enthusiastic high school cheerleader. Or maybe she’s a sorority girl at a post-football-game-party. The academic imagery isn’t too far off. Newton-John’s grandfather was German physicist, Nobel winner, Max Born, and her father was headmaster of an Australian college.
Producer/guitarist John Farrar’s touches are everywhere on the album. He avoided making Newton-John too sugary by not adding orchestral arrangements or smoothening the rough edges of her voice. Farrar’s composition (Farrar wrote three of the album’s ten songs), “Totally Hot,” is a cute jingle that any grade schooler could remember, and is bound to have as much appeal as “You’re The One That I Want.”
The album has its share of artificially sung tear jerkers that entertain but are not memorable. Her songs are straight forward love songs. There’s no metaphorical imagery in the lyrics and no insinuated violence anywhere.
Farrar kept the sound down to rock basics-guitars, piano, percussion and it remains for Newton-John to carry the album on the strength of her voice alone. She does, and Newton-John continually shows a boisterous attempt to produce entertaining and danceable pop music. None of the songs have any social comment. Most are naively worded and deal with capturing everyday instances between people.
Good vocals withstanding. there isn’t much else to the album. There are no breakthroughs in style for Newton-John and her songs offer a minimum insight to the performer as do the songs of other talented women singers who rarely use their own material, like Yvonne Elliman, Linda Ronstadt and Barbi Benton.
Newton-John’s vocals are shown off to their best advantage on the two Newton-John penned compositions, “Borrowed Time” and “Talk To Me.”
An album of her own compositions might give Newton-John fans something a little more tangible to hang onto than the passable but ordinary material on “Totally Hot.”
By Dave Steinman