* 1/2, BRYAN ADAMS, “18 ‘Til I Die”, A

Eighteen? Try 14. Or maybe 10 would be more like it, given the mentality of Adams’ return to his good-time rocker role after a five-year side trip as a romantic movie-balladeer-for-hire.

The sub-juvenile tee-hee titillation of some song titles--”The Only Thing That Looks Good on Me Is You” and “(I Wanna Be Your) Underwear”--is bad enough. The songs themselves, witless puns crammed into forced rhymes set to recycled riffs, give dumb fun a bad name. And the title song--an apparently sincere anthem to arrested development--should be ashamed to share its number with Alice Cooper’s definitive ode to the same age.

Meanwhile, Adams’ mega-success with gooey movie songs seems to have inspired him: The empty, cheerleading rocker “We’re Gonna Win” sounds like a shameless bid for ESPN highlights montages, while the sex-equals-love ballad “Let’s Make a Night to Remember” sounds written primarily to be pitched to soap operas. Speaking of soundtracks, in case you didn’t hear “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” too much when it was a hit last year from the film “Don Juan DeMarco,” it’s appended here as well.

Is this banality by design or by nature? Even after all these years, it’s hard to say--and hard to say which would be worse.

*

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).

* TimesLine 808-8463

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