Never Letting Go is framed by two copious ballads on which Phoebe Snow sings with an intellectual and emotional understanding joined to a technical mastery that no current popular singer can equal. The rest of Never Letting Go fritters itself away on seven trivial songs, five of them written by Snow.

In her repeated attempts to compose memorable pop laments, Snow lacks a felicitous verbal touch. The conceit of "Majesty of Life" is ringingly banal; the wordplay in "Ride the Elevator" is feeble. "Electra" is the sort of thing an ex-folkie pop singer thinks of as a rock tune. Snow's melodies are, if anything, too simple and never permit her to utilize the prodigious weapons she has made of her phrasing and scatting. In this case, her honest modesty is a serious handicap.

Two successes out of nine songs do not a triumphant album make, but two nonoriginals are remarkable achievements. "Love Makes a Woman" revives mid-Sixties soul as a hotbed of terse, eloquent passion. Snow twists the sweetly dolorous "Garden of Joy Blues" into a languid philosophic moan, simultaneously stately and erotic.

The most urgent implication of Never Letting Go is that Snow ought to concentrate her gifts on the interpretation of songs and not the writing of them. (RS 253)

KEN TUCKER