POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Strait’s Show Delivers Straight Stuff at Pond

Smooth, comfortable and easygoing as a performer, smiling, familiar and eminently sane as a personality, country music star George Strait was a reassuring visitor at a frazzled time when the heartland whose verities he sings has exploded with images of death, damage, and the scary stone faces of meshuggeneh militia.

Strait’s performance at the sold-out Pond of Anaheim on Friday was characteristically solid, proficient and unadventurous. The show included his hit “Heartland” with its upbeat refrain: Sing a song about the heartland / sing a song about my life.

A restless, probing artist might have shadowed that chorus with a note of irony, discordance or embattled determination. But Strait isn’t that kind of figure, and he sang it straight, as he did everything else in his 21-song program.

The result was a concert that offered nothing memorable or deep, nothing jarring or surprising, but that did measure up well on the scale of mild, undemanding pleasures. In short, it was a quintessential slice of contemporary mainstream country music--a mainstream in which Strait has swum successfully with an unbroken string of 19 consecutive gold and platinum albums since his 1981 debut.

Strait delivered a tasteful, varied, lightly enjoyable show on a night when music from an idealized heartland offered respite from news of the real one.