This is the eagerly awaited collaboration between avant-garde rocker Robert Fripp and Daryl Hall (the willowy half of Hall and Oates) that was withheld for two years, apparently because RCA feared that Sacred Songs' flirtation with the tape-loop void so dear to Fripp's cerebellum would dismay all those faithful Hall and Oates fans who dote on the duo's fulsome soul-rock.

Sacred Songs is, however, a much more accessible and effective album than, for example, Hall and Oates' own landmark of embarrassing radicalism. War Babies. Producer and guitarist Fripp's sense of experimentation is dry and discrete here, which provides a pleasing tension in styles, since Hall's vocals have always been wild, florid challenges to the blue-eyed-soul tradition.

Though they certainly have their differences, Daryl Hall and Robert Fripp do share a veneration for high romanticism. Thus, when Hall writes a passionate you-gotta-have-love song ("Something in 4/4 Time") that uses rock meter as its metaphor, Fripp embellishes the sentiments with guitars and keyboards that sound like a robot's idea of a string section. These mechanistic "violins" swell around Hall's crooning, moistening his hoarse yells. Similarly, the LP's closing ballad, "Without Tears," features Hall's closest approximation yet of a one-man Little Anthony and the Imperials, while Fripp places a soft, pulsing guitar loop behind the singer to complement his histrionic wails.

Sacred Songs avoids the fatuous sentimentality that invariably smothers Daryl Hall's work with John Oates, however, because its best tunes emphasize the chilliness of Robert Fripp's playing. And in the record's finest composition, "Babs and Babs," everything comes together in a small masterpiece of baroque irony as sharp synthesizer riffs slash through the wittily mindless tale of two earnest featherheads, the eerie twins Babs and Babs. If effete novelist Ronald Firbank were alive today, he might have written this sweetly perverse and ever-so-delicately unnerving pop song. (RS 317)

KEN TUCKER