In throwing 'Seven the Hard Way', Pat Benatar plays to win this crap game called love. Luck has little to do with her position as the apotheosis of Eighties American womanhood – she got there through experience. Using her fiery multi-octave range to project just the right mixture of man-chewing no-non-sense and tough-girl vulnerability, the divine denim-clad gamine howls indomitably through love's terror-filled jungles using the best weapons in her arsenal: faith, grit and vocal chops that hit every impossibly cathartic high note.

Behind the scenes, producer-guitarist-songwriter-husband Neil Geraldo uses the studio like a machete to help Pat slice through the thorny entanglements of relationships. Pat and Neil seem to be a match made in AOR heaven. Their approach combines the sonic bombast of yarbling metal with the intelligence and compassion of feminist consciousness. Railing against the constraints of male-dominated power rock, Pat Benatar sings her lungs out with the kind of sentiments that the rock boize might address if they only had the balls. When Pat demands, "Stop using sex as a weapon," she threatens her lover without emasculating him.

The album is a tour through an emotional combat zone, with Pat Benatar as both steely drill sergeant and aide-de-camp offering advice to the shellshocked. In "The Art of Letting Go," she advocates a technique for recovery she candidly admits she has never learned how to practice. In "7 Rooms of Gloom," Pat murmurs her way through an old Holland-Dozier-Holland he's-gone-and-all-that's-left-is-emptiness chestnut filled with personal bitterness and nary a whiff of Motown nostalgia. In "Red Vision," a vicious duel of slashing guitars and synth-drum throb, she lets her lover have it right in the pineal gland. On "Walking in the Underground" and "Le Bel Age," Pat and Neil re-create those ineffable, necessarily transient moments when love is perfect.

Pat's willing to go down in flames for passion, and in rolling Seven the Hard Way, she's saying you just can't win if you don't throw the dice. And that it's better to crap out than never to have loved at all. (RS 465)

TIM HOLMES