On his later albums, Bruce Cockburn has changed from a reflective Christian mystic into an impressionistic diarist whose feelings about love, politics and the cosmos spill out in Beat Generation-inspired streams of consciousness. As he's grown more confessional, Cockburn's music has expanded from its acoustic folk-jazz base to include reggae and a harder jazz-fusion-tinged rock. Inner City Front consists of nine sprawling mood pieces whose long-lined verses and poetically heightened imagery recall Joni Mitchell's Hejira.

Like Mitchell's post cards from the road, Cockburn's cityscapes are framed by musical settings as flexible and shifting as the emotional life they chronicle. A folk-jazz love song with cosmic echoes, "And We Dance" revolves around the quaveringly responsive bass of Dennis Pendrith, while Hugh Marsh's electric violin hypnotically surrounds the singer's soliloquy about isolation. A biting reggae beat underscores "Justice," Cockburn's clear-eyed indictment of man's inhumanity to man. Many of the artist's images are startlingly precise. In "You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance," an action sequence set in Toronto's red-light district, Cockburn observes "raindrops creeping sperm-like across the car window." The bus station in "Loner" is a place of "shark grins and sandpaper conversation."

Though there are moments here and there in which Bruce Cockburn overreaches himself, this intense, beautiful record is proof that the moribund singer/songwriter tradition hasn't completely exhausted itself. (RS 364)

STEPHEN HOLDEN