Over The Rainbow is a fine distillation of Livingston Taylor's musical Puritanism. Liv's approach to both singing and writing has always tended to the unassuming, even to the self-effacing, and Rainbow again highlights the approach. Of the album's 11 cuts, all but two—the familiar title song and George Harrison's "If I Needed Someone"—are originals and Liv's treatments of these chestnuts are so unpretentious that they sound as though he'd written them himself.

Liv's nine original songs are uniformly good, the chief theme being his search for domestic and spiritual tranquility. Taylor's musical models are traditional folk melodies and American hymn tunes, whose modality he combines with graceful expertise. Vocally Liv can sound so subdued or subtle that he seems bland. His rigorous note-for-note phrasing is silhouetted by Ed Freeman's production which, though it includes brass and strings, rarely intrudes on the vocals.

Side one opens with a hymn-like celebration whose title, "Loving Be My New Horizon," contains the message. There follows three more songs in which Liv is the courtly country lover in various stages of pursuit—"Pretty Woman" (an upbeat rocker), "Falling in Love With You" and "I Can Dream of You." "Blind," which concludes the side, returns to hymnology to express a state of emotional-spiritual impasse.

"Over The Rainbow" Liv treats as the simplest of acoustic waltzes. It is a delight, as is his own wistfully stoic "Rodeo" which follows. Only in the second-to-last cut, "Let Me Go Down," does Liv relax his phrasing and let out with some despair. The album concludes with a laid-back spiritual, "Oh Hallelujah," that restores and formalizes the dominant spirit of reflective affirmation.

While the musical integrity and understated eloquence of Over The Rainbow are beyond question, missing are the vocal intimacy and sensuous instrumentation that made Liv, Taylor's last album, more emotionally accessible. Still, I'll take Over The Rainbow over the work of countless singer/songwriters whose flash exceeds their substance. Liv Taylor is one of the few who admirably reverses those priorities. (RS 148)

STEPHEN HOLDEN