While their most compelling virtue is their lovely vocal interplay, Kate and Anna McGarrigle have always been careful to use classy session players. As a result, it sometimes seems as if the sisters are making the point that their mix of church music, ballads and north-of-the-border jug-band fare is not some quaint folkie goulash but a disciplined series of choices. Love Over and Over, with Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler playing perky guitar on the title track, is the Canadian duo's most meticulous album yet.

The LP was compiled over more than two years of peregrinations from studio to studio, and perhaps because of that long incubation, the tone is uneven; "The Work Song" sounds shopworn, and the love songs (though enlivened by a French-language version of Bob Seger's "You'll Accomp'ny Me") are not so striking as predecessors like "My Town."

The singular achievement here is in the way the songs explore the voice and spirit of a particularly enlightened but never smartass child. The determined waif of "On My Way to Town," the marveling lakeside observer in "Sun, Son (Shining on the Water)" and the plucky little savant of "Star Cab Co." all speak as children really do, without sentimentality or irony. When the McGarrigles deliver these innocent epiphanies via the crystalline harmonies of "Sun, Son" or the not-shy singsonging of "Star Cab Co.," the result is authenticity as warm and natural as it is rare. Such moments make this album as bracing as a walk in the rustic landscape that spawned it. (RS 391)

FRED SCHRUERS