ALBUM REVIEW : Heavy Themes No Burden in Folksy ‘Light of the Day’ : Steve Gillette & Cindy Mangsen “The Light of the Day” Compass Rose Music (*** 1/2)

In the 1960s, Steve Gillette was one of the first folkies from Orange County to make a mark in the wider world when his songs were covered by the likes of Ian & Sylvia and Linda Ronstadt. Thirty years on, the ‘60s folk boom may be a distant memory, but Gillette and Cindy Mangsen, his wife and musical accomplice since 1989, continue to show how valuable and moving tradition-steeped folk songs can be.

“The Light of the Day” is a fervent, austerely beautiful album that sings softly but carries a stickful of dynamite when it comes to emotional impact and moral seriousness. The questions that the Vermont-based couple keep asking are fundamental: What makes for a good life and a fitting death? How can we find comfort and meaning in the face of death’s inevitability? What traditions are worth following, and which ones only perpetuate the wrongs of the past?

Gillette and Mangsen bear that heavy thematic freight without strain or pretension, thanks to their evocative writing and strong performing gifts. Mangsen’s voice is pure and clear, intimate rather than imposing. She visits the very heart of sad Irish balladry in a version of the traditional 19th century war-widow’s lament “The Bonny Light Horseman.” Concertina is Mangsen’s main instrument, and she coaxes from the humble squeeze box tones of lustrous beauty--with the occasional playful skid or slide tossed in on the lighter numbers that the duo includes for comic relief.

Gillette plays a nimble acoustic rhythm guitar that moves in perfect sync with his wife’s concertina melody lines. His baritone, which can rise to a sweet, high cry, gains its authority not from raw vocal power but from the deep fervency of his phrasing. Side players color the intimate musical space with such touches as oboe, fiddle and the folk-rocking clarinet of “Hole in My Shoe.”

At the album’s core is “The Unicorn,” in which Gillette and co-writer Ted Miller imaginatively re-create the medieval myth. The moral test, in this darkly urgent song’s final twist, becomes not whether the quester is fit to capture the beast, but whether she can bring herself to spare it. That means rejecting all conditioning, social expectation, and utilitarian advantage--the full weight of a tradition that bears down on her, demanding unicorn blood.

“1800 and Froze to Death,” a heartening tale of charity and community drawn from Vermont history, and “Song for Gamble,” a tribute to a folk singer’s vibrant performing life and selfless death in an attempted rescue (“He left this world holding out his hand”), offer examples of right choices.

Mangsen’s “Dark of the Moon” gently extols perseverance and the ability to find enduring connections amid hardship and loss; “The Restless Wind,” an eloquently spiritual country song by Gillette and his regular O.C.-based writing partner, Rex Benson, takes a cosmic view of mortality and finds beauty in a cycle of death and regeneration. In a political year when powers and pundits are trumpeting prescriptions for public virtue, Gillette & Mangsen remind us that listening closely to a soft voice in a quiet moment may be a likelier path to wisdom.

(Available from Compass Rose Music, P.O. Box 1501, Bennington, VT 05201.)

* Steve Gillette and Cindy Mangsen play tonight at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062 Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. 7:30 p.m. $14. (714) 364-5270.

Albums are rated on a scale of * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.