CD Review Newton-John's Essential offers nothing important
By Tom Maurstad, Dallas Morning News
“Back to Basics: The Essential Collection 1971-1992” Olivia Newton-John (Geffen)
There are many descriptives I could attach to a greatest-hits package unearthing some of the dusty nuggets from Olivia Newton-John’s career. “Essential” certainly isn’t one of them.
Given that the Australian singer’s career sputtered out of sight back in the early ’80s, you might have permitted yourself to forget, to just let go of songs such as “Have You Never Been Been Mellow,” to work through moves such as “Xanadu.”
Well, brace yourself.
To listen to Ms. Newton-John is to be struck by just what a blank and empty instrument the human voice can be. What’s more, because of her waifish persona, she has made a career of performing torch songs of love, desire, loss, longing and despair. Yet she is no more capable of evoking such emotions in her singing than she would be of levitating a Volkswagen overhead while singing of them.
But as silly as her vintage material is, the four new songs demonstrate that, if anything, Ms. Newton-John is even more resolutely banal and saccharine than in her heyday.