Keith Palmer;All I Can Be;Light at the End of the Tunnel

ETCETERA: Three contemporary vocalists making their major-label debuts hope that 1992 will prove another Year of the New Face in country music: Singer- songwriter Keith Palmer likes to portray himself as an Arkansas good-timey good ol' boy on Keith Palmer (Epic), but on closer inspection Palmer, who wrote Reba McEntire's No. 1 hit ''For My Broken Heart,'' is a singer of far more subtlety and emotional range-his confident, easy vocals transform ''That's Enough to Keep Me Hangin' On'' into the kind of heartache ballad that defines half the world's domestic relationships. B... Like Lee Greenwood, Collin Raye began his career in the hotels of Nevada, perfecting a generic brand of glossy country music. That lack of original style is both the strength and the weakness of All I Can Be (Epic), memorable mostly for ''Love, Me,'' a sentimental No. 1 hit about enduring love among the grandparent set. C+... B.B. Watson scored a minor hit with the title song of Light at the End of the Tunnel (BNA/BMG), a comical take on a luckless Joe poised to be flattened by a freight train. But with the exception of an enthusiastic cover of ''Hank Drank,'' a terrific song that applies the myth and legend of Hank Williams to a common man's failed romance, the rest of Watson's album is crude, lewd, and rude-songs of double entendre set to ripsaw vocals and melodies borrowed from everyone from Merle Haggard to Mick Jagger. C- -AN