of rock trends, dated, since John Lennon summed it up nine years ago: all you need is love. But Pratt is the first rock artist to attempt to sustain this idea for a whole album—the first to take David Crosby's statement that music is love and try to prove the equation. And he does. While the Beatles confused love with politics, the Beach Boys with fun, the Stones with seduction, and Donovan with childhood, Pratt's open-ended definition includes all of the above and more.

From his postpsychedelic perch, Pratt describes love as a "searching song" in lyrics that are alternately autobiographical and visionary: they evoke the immediacy of a mystical experience. Though mystical transcendence followed by a missionary desire to share the experience is common enough these days, most people, in their zeal to share, become mired in earnestness. Not Pratt.

Resolution is no overnight career success. Pratt's out-of-print 1971 debut on Polydor, Records Are like Life, presented him as an eccentric, jazzy singer/songwriter influenced equally by Mose Allison, Donovan and the Beatles. Two years later, on his second, more rock oriented album for Columbia, Pratt flaunted many of the stylistic qualities that show up on Resolution in a more disciplined form: rhythmic adventurousness, frequent and unpredictable harmonic modulation and offbeat multiple vocals.

On Resolution, Pratt's avantgarde impulses are restrained in a much fuller, more melodic context. The lyrics are simple and compelling and, though mystically directed, too emotionally raw to fall prey to smugness or didacticism. The first and last cuts, "Resolution" and "Love Song," serve as bookends to a Mass of life in which the music, lyrics, singing and production work together.

What makes the album emotionally and spiritually overwhelming is the vulnerability of Pratt's singing. Though his passionate lead vocals must have taken hours to record, they have the explosive spontaneity of inspired first takes. Pratt, who can sound like many rock stars when he wants to, resembles Mick Jagger most often in his fierce hard-rock attacks and Leo Sayer in his falsetto. But Jagger sounds mannered and jaded after Pratt, while Sayer seems the slapstick vaudevillian beside Pratt's cosmic clown.

In its technical achievement alone, Resolution sets production standards that the record industry will be