O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Strait, Simple and of the Heartland : Country music star’s show at The Pond was solid and unadventurous--which is just what a bomb-weary public needs.

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

Strait’s performance was characteristically solid, proficient and unadventurous Friday night as he played to a sold-out Pond of Anaheim. 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, 43 on May 18, has swum successfully with an unbroken string of 19 consecutive gold and platinum albums since his 1981 debut.

Granting him the drastic limitations of his chosen Nashville milieu, which simply doesn’t reward risk, 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.

Handsome, blue-jeaned and white-hatted, singing in an easy-to-swallow voice, exhibiting none of the extracurricular wildness and performing intensity of such thorny, hardscrabble figures of the country tradition as Hank Williams, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Strait is a gentleman Texas rancher who helped make it profitable for Nashville to play it safe.

But Strait’s latest album, “Lead On,” is actually one of the most honest and emotionally believable efforts to have emerged lately from the Nashville machinery, and he drew heavily from it in concert.

Strait used his natural, unforced twang to good effect on tradition-leaning material, including lively covers of George Jones’ “Lovebug” and the sashaying “Milkcow Blues,” the only number that drew upon his Western Swing antecedents. “Adalida” was a bright, lively, Cajun-inflected tune from the new album.

“Down in Louisiana,” another new one, offered a nice, warmly sentimental twist on the “evil city vs. wholesome small town” cliche that is the fulcrum of many a mainstream country song. In it, Strait plays a character who follows his heart back to the country, but not without bidding a decidedly fond farewell to old urban haunts.

A touch of pop-ballad fuzziness entered the picture at times, with Strait’s veteran, eight-man Ace in the Hole Band momentarily losing its firm grip amid the treacly arrangement of the fervent romantic ballad “Lead On.”

The lovely rodeo rider’s lament, “Amarillo by Morning,” and the hokey but cute singles-bar slice of life, “The Chair,” were among the handful of ‘80s-vintage hits in a show dominated by material from Strait’s hotter-than-ever records of the past three years.

Saying almost nothing but smiling plenty, Strait paced the show well with a combination of attractive ballads and energetic, if not quite fiery up-tempo songs. His voice was bright and his singing engaged, except when he dipped into the lower reaches of his range, where he tended to lose power and be overcome by the band.

Strait made the best of a badly compromised in-the-round format by working his way counterclockwise around the stage, singing one or two complete songs to each quadrant before rotating to the next. In that format, stage-wandering during songs ruins everybody’s ability to focus and connect with the performance. But the compromise was still severe.

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Set up in a wide oval, the Ace in the Hole Band looked better positioned to re-enact Custer’s Last Stand than to play a concert and interact with the singer. Fans on the north side of The Pond got nothing but a rear view of Strait’s two lead guitarists and his lanky ace fiddler, Gene Elders. Strait also neglected to face north for any of his ballads, which may have disappointed his more romantically inclined fans.

Opener Faith Hill, whose debut album is a million-seller, looked forward by devoting most of her 45-minute set to unreleased songs from an album-in-progress.

Opting for nonstop circling around the stage perimeter, and playing unfamiliar songs, the comely Mississippian had trouble drawing the crowd in much of the time, despite a likable manner and an attractive voice. Hill did connect with a couple of new ballads about women trapped in marriages to violent or neglectful men. In both cases, although the themes are matters of public controversy, the plot lines and images were predictable.

A probing performance could have added dimension to the tales, but Hill chose to sing them with monochrome, catch-in-the-throat plaintiveness rather than register as well the bitterness and bristling anger explicit in the lyrics. Like her bubbly, trivializing cover of Janis Joplin’s fierce classic “Piece of My Heart,” which began the set, these songs suggested that Hill lacks the daring to take darker visions to their most vivid extremes.