Broken Heartland

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

PERFORMER: REBA MCENTIRE

ALBUM: IT'S YOUR CALL

LABEL: MCA

THE BOTTOM LINE: Call them relaxing or cathartic, these vocals from one of the best country singers linger in the mind.

COUNTRY MUSIC AT ITS WORST IS like Marlboro Country, peopled with pseudo cowboys in tight jeans, ten-gallon hats and boots made from cute animals. One senses a moral cancer beneath the surface: the all-American spirit of the music, far from including all Americans, actually seems a form of exclusion for people and issues. For years, the androgynous singer k.d. lang was locked out of main-stream country. Garth Brooks caught flak for a video that dared deal with domestic violence.

Reba McEntire, 37, is part of country's continental drift. Shouldn't country music mean the whole country, after all? Like fellow Oklahoman Brooks, McEntire is making country music bigger, taking it higher. Her last album, 1991's mournful For My Broken Heart, sold more than 2 million copies, although one track dealt with euthanasia and another with a retirement home.

"I find myself more relaxed with Reba coming over the airwaves," George Bush once wrote in an essay in Country America magazine. But McEntire isn't relaxing, she's cathartic. Her songs tend to be simple tales about someone who done her some wrong.

On the title song, It's Your Call, McEntire's voice comes rolling in, a fogbank of joylessness. A mistress calls and a wife answers, handing the phone to her adulterous husband: "Yeah, I know all about it; don't act so surprised." The descent continues. On Will He Ever Go Away, McEntire deals with a love affair's ruins, asking, "Shouldn't I start living my life for myself?" She doesn't answer the question, letting it linger in the last twangs of the song.

One can't help thinking that this sadness is informed by real pain. McEntire has been through divorce and remarriage. She has known true catastrophe: in 1991 seven members of her band were killed in a plane crash. Tragedy, when absorbed and reflected on, can give an artist depth. Some artists seek it, others have it thrust upon them. It's the difference between martyrdom and masochism -- McEntire's scars are earned.

But heartache is a cliche in country music. On this album McEntire adds something special: a sort of time-to-put-myself-first feminism. On her 1986 hit Whoever's in New England, she took on the persona of a still devoted housewife pining for her itinerant, philandering mate: "You'll always have a place to come back to, when whoever's in New England's through with you."

That's courage of a kind. On her new album she explores its isotope: the courage to throw the bum out. On Take It Back, a song that rocks like the house band in a sports bar, she tells off a man with a cheatin' heart: "Tonight laying on the street/ Babe, your bag is packed."

It's Your Call is marred by unadventurous arrangements. McEntire is listed as a co-producer on the album; she should have been willing to shear away the instrumentation, tasteful as it is, and expose her voice and all the raw hurt it bears. Still, her singing transcends commonplace melodies to find the anguish between the words, behind the music. Even cowgirls get the blues, but McEntire's vibrant vocals seem to say there's hope in the deepest of doldrums. Reba's pure-country voice is a lariat across an abyss.