Resolution successfully resurrects the late-Sixties idea of rock as high art. Inspired by the best psychedelic rock of everyone from the Beach Boys to the Rolling Stones, Resolution blends the mature styles of these groups in one of the most elaborate and costly rock productions ever undertaken. By enhancing their musical ideas with his own more sophisticated style, Pratt accomplishes the fusion of rock and classical music that so many artists have tried for and missed.

The philosophy of Resolution is simple and, in terms 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 unable to ignore. Arif Mardin's extraordinarily rich production points the way toward a style of record making more ambitious and complex than anything Brian Wilson and Phil Spector have attempted. Though the sound of Resolution is grandly phantasmagoric, every instrument is clearly articulated and mixed hot. Always emotionally charged, the instrumental textures evoke volcanic eroticism on one cut, aching tenderness on another. The musical fabric is thick enough to support an unusually heavy drum sound, while Mardin's orchestral arrangements and his use of upper-register percussion are unprecedentedly lavish for a rock album.

The songs carry rock harmony one step beyond the Beach Boys and the Stones. Because they modulate so frequently and unexpectedly, they require great concentration. Given that, the changes seem not just logical, but inevitable. Not even the most die-hard antirock fanatic could call these melodies boring or clichéd, for their cadences are mercurial like no one else's. Like the late-19th-century Romantic composers, especially Scriabin and Mahler, Pratt uses chromatic restlessness to evoke extreme emotional volatility. It would all probably seem silly and overwrought if he didn't balance this intensity with humor, a characteristic that was in very short supply among late-19th-century Romantics.

Resolution is filled with accessible, joyful humor. "If You Could See Yourself (Through My Eyes)" bounces around like a squeaky calliope. "Set Your Sights" skids along to a jaunty Caribbean motif. "Treasure That Canary" segues from a near replica of the Stones' "No Expectations" into an improvement on the main theme of the Beach Boys' "Sail On Sailor." Toward the end of "Karen's Song," a riveting piece of erotica, Pratt laughs at himself and confides: "But when she strips me naked and oo how she can/ You see a little fuzzy-brained intellectual/Who just became a real man." Such candor is hard to resist. Probably the best-sounding cut of all, "That's When Miracles Occur," magically fuses the style of the Bee Gees "Fanny (Be Tender with My Love)" with that of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" in music that romps ecstatically.

Resolution's reflective ballads create a nice balance with its antic celebrations. "Constant Heat," a shivering, orgasmic devotion, contains the album's most romantic music. The most touching song, "Can't Stop My Love," is a remembrance by Pratt of his late father that blends conversational and elegiac diction:

You used to carry me to bed And I turned away from you I held back my love I know that now

Can't stop my love for you Here I am still alive

The album's ample rock guitar grows organically out of carefully plotted keyboard-based structures. On his last album, Pratt played and sang almost every part; here he hands the guitar work to Mark Doyle, a little-known but first-rate talent. "Resolution," "Karen's Song" and "Treasure That Canary," in particular, show Doyle to be a master of the Mick Ralphs/Mick Ronson guitar style.

Obviously Pratt has long seen in the best of the Stones and the Beach Boys the flowering of a genuine high art rock tradition. Unlike other art rock aspirants, Pratt believes in the potential greatness of the form enough to work with the ambition of a classical composer almost entirely within rock's own tradition. Pratt's last album didn't quite accomplish this because too much of it imitated his idols' experiments. Resolution builds only from their successes. While the orchestration has a classical kind of grandeur, it is used throughout the album in the rock manner, for textural augmentation only, and not thematic exposition. The distinction is crucial. Finally, and most importantly, the humor and eroticism of Resolution are totally rock based—they'd be almost unthinkable in another musical genre. By reviving the dream of rock as art and then reinventing it, Pratt has forever changed the face of rock. (RS 216)

STEPHEN HOLDEN