The Wanderer is Donna Summer's most consistent album, and that alone would make it her best. But this disc does something more for Summer. By placing her firmly within a rock & roll context in which she thrives, The Wanderer clearly proves that she's an artist as well as a star. The result is music that exudes both strength and delight.

It's almost redundant to say that this is Summer's finest LP. Her career is a story in which each chapter tops the last, from her escape from the seeming dead end of the novelty hit, "Love to Love You Baby," to the breakthrough of Bad Girls. The Wanderer is less a breakthrough, however, than a consolidation of all the good points of Summer's recent records. It picks up the loose threads on albums like I Remember Yesterday, Once upon a Time and Bad Girls and weaves them into a personal sound and statement.

It shouldn't be too surprising that Donna Summer's most mature sound is based on rock & roll. While she's certainly been shaped by black culture, Summer has never been especially comfortable with the gospel phrasing of such soul singers as Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin. Though her vocal touch is lighter, the relentless groove of her music is harder. In her best songs, she echoes Carla Thomas' "Gee Whiz" and Darlene Love's "Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry" far more than Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Loved You)." These traits were revealed as early as I Remember Yesterday (brimming with girl-group homage), and they explode in The Wanderer's "Who Do You Think You're Foolin'," in which Summer attains the pinnacle of hard-boiled romanticism that Darlene Love expressed in some of Phil Spector's finest productions.

But that, too, is a misleading analogy, since it suggests that Summer is a producer's protégé. She isn't–and not only because she's always had a hand in writing her best numbers. More important than Donna Summer's solo writing is her collaborative work, as a performer and writer, with the studio team of producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte and the very underrated engineer-arranger-keyboardist Harold Faltermeyer. Together, this quartet functions as a rock band in much the same way that Steely Dan's Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and Gary Katz do. Whether or not they ever appear onstage as a unit is irrelevant. What's really crucial are the slashing, Who-style power chords of, say, "Cold Love," which Summer punches across like the ultimate Anglo-rock singer, and the absolute seamlessness of The Wanderer's material. (Though she rarely writes as explicitly about infidelity and physical love as Bellotte does, it would otherwise be almost impossible to guess which of these compositions was written by whom.)

On The Wanderer, Summer, Moroder, Bellotte and Faltermeyer mesh more smoothly than ever, revealing (among other things) how shamelessly padded their early work was. But the LP also shows they've reached a peak where the pieces fall into place with a certain inevitability. This is a position of rare strength, and it's been achieved because, while collaboration remains the essence, Donna Summer is the controlling center, the single indispensable element. Teamwork gives The Wanderer its remarkable consistency, but it's Summer who pulls everything together with such intense purposefulness that the album is finally a complete and convincing statement of innocence, faith, joy, terror and the ability to deal with life head-on.

"The Wanderer" itself is the summation of these themes: musically and lyrically, it sets up what is to follow. Inevitably, the tune emerges as a declaration of independence–not only independence from the business entanglements of past years but from creative pigeonholing and whatever fears the artist may have had. In track after track, Summer beats back the night and blasts through dread into the finer emotions. The portraits of street life in "Running for Cover" and the opening verse of "Nightlife," the hard-knocks romances of "Breakdown" and "Cold Love," the commentaries on stardom in "Who Do You Think You're Foolin'" and "Stop Me" are all of a piece.

Yet Donna Summer's journey from innocence to experience is built on such firm foundations that it's utterly without bitterness. Even in The Wanderer's most awesome and shattering love song, the brittle and brilliant "Cold Love," she's triumphant: "Hope in the dark, love in the light/I'll keep on looking for someone who's right." In the end, this triumph is so total that the closing number, "I Believe in Jesus" (a statement of belief so naive it ought to seem puerile), sounds completely natural and fitting.

"I Believe in Jesus" is the first convincing gospel-based vocal performance of Summer's career. Based on the militant fundamentalist hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers" and the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb," the composition escapes being cloying only by the narrowest of margins–a chorus so perfectly sung that to deny it is practically inconceivable: "I believe in Jesus you know I know him oh so well/And I'm going to heaven by and by 'cause I already been through hell."

These words evoke images of those satin jackets that soldiers used to bring back from Vietnam–jackets that displayed a map of the country with large stars locating Khe Sanh or Da Nang and the same flat statements about having witnessed hell on earth. In its way, I think, The Wanderer is a road map of Donna Summer's soul. And while nothing on it matches the hellishness of actual combat, the analogy is less a conceit than a metaphor that the rest of this resounding record gives her the absolute right to use. (RS 339)

DAVE MARSH