Alabama All Shook Up but Numbingly Dull

It didn’t seem a very fair trade: The Southland treated the members of Alabama to what singer Randy Owen said was their first earthquake, and Alabama gave Southern Californians just another numbingly dull show Friday evening at the Pacific Amphitheatre.

Despite recent new-traditionalist pretensions, the quartet continued to leech the life and immediacy out of country music, leaving a treacly effluvium that has more in common with disco than country. How close to country frankness and raw roots could they come when they’re performing amid flashing strobes and pulsing synthesizers on a stage with a futuristic strip-mall-yogurt-shop look?

At its best--as on “Love in the First Degree” and “Lady Down on Love”--the group turned in some well-crafted vocal harmonies, but the songs still sounded like commercials for a very weak beer. At its worst, it offered “The Borderline,” a miniseries vision of a cowboy trail ballad devoid of grit and feeling. Nowhere was the mediocrity of the band more evident than on the encore, which included versions of “Land of 1,000 Dances” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Countless bar bands have played these songs, and most could churn them out with more color and passion than Alabama.