ALABAMA BOUND

“THE TOUCH.” Alabama. RCA. You don’t need insider trading tips to guess that Alabama’s latest album will leave its stock portfolio as healthy as ever. Country music’s Multimillion Dollar Quartet offers nothing here likely to alienate the group’s legion of fans, but neither will it change the minds of those who consider Alabama’s music slickly produced hokum. There’s the obligatory ode to the working man (“Vacation”), a concert foot-stomper (“Cruisin’ ”) and the overtly sensitive love song (“Touch Me When We’re Dancing”). There is, however, at least one song in which the group stretches its proven formula: the eight-minute quasi-epic “Pony Express,” whose story about the passing of an era never quite lives up to the towering production.