Peter Wolf: Come As You Are

Artist: Peter Wolf
Title: Come As You Are
Acquired: Early 1990s from a cut-out bin
Rating: 5/10

This album comes from the peak of the "pop star" portion of Peter Wolf's lengthy recording career. The clues are everywhere: Top 20 hit title track? Check. Synthesizers? Check. Music videos? Check. Liner note pictures showing Peter Wolf in various degrees of shirtlessness? Check. This actually all works reasonably well for what it is, but seeing the formerly goateed J. Geils Band frontman, who once recorded covers of John Lee Hooker and Otis Rush numbers, striking a pop pose is at least moderately incongruous and unsettling, kind of like going on an African safari and seeing a giraffe wearing a bow tie and bowler hat.

That said, the songs here really aren't too bad. Occasionally things get snarled up by the production, as on Blue Avenue, which is drowned in breathy synthesizer faux-vocals, or on Thick as Thieves, featuring a guitar lick that would be pretty exciting if it didn't sound like it were being played to a metronome by a robot.

The lyrics are a hoot - most of the songs here feature either pithy couplets occasionally reminiscent of Mother Goose, or at times a collection of single words or short phrases. There are exceptions, but the cumulative effect suggests that Wolf was to be paid by the word, and a memo came from Accounting that costs would need to be kept down for the next few months in order to meet the third quarter projections.

I know, I'm saying that like it's a bad thing. There's nothing necessarily wrong with lyrics being childlike - certainly nobody can accuse Wolf of being unnecessarily arty or pretentious. A small sampling of the nursery rhymes found here:

"Times Square
Odd pairs
Red glare
Gotta beware"
- Wind Me Up

"Young and innocent
Innocent for love
Young and restless
Restless for love"
- Mamma Said

"Butchers walking down the street
Thinking I'm a piece of meat
Like to hang me on a hook
Cut me up and call the cook"
- Thick As Thieves

"Cyclorama
Melodrama
And, hey, let's face it, we'd been drinkin', too"
- Love On Ice

"I got caught in a blind man's bluff
Feeling like the odd man out"
- Can't Get Started

All in all, I like this album, even while it fails to amaze or inspire. When I listen to it, I am left mildly entertained (you can quote me on that when the remaster is issued - "Mildly entertaining, raves RDConz!"). So I'm giving it a rating right in the middle of my arbitrary numerical spectrum: 5/10.

Stiff Little Fingers: The Peel Sessions

Artist: Stiff Little Fingers
Title: The Peel Sessions
Acquired: Early 1990s, probably from The Exclusive Company or B-Side Records
Rating: 4/10

While I rate it slightly better, I would say this CD is actually less necessary than the Adam and the Ants Peel Sessions CD I reviewed a while back. What this CD consists of is mostly inferior versions of non-rarities, so the question becomes "why own it at all?"

There are 3 sessions of 4 songs each on this CD, sequenced in chronological order. We start with four Inflammable Material tracks recorded in 1978, which are then followed by eight Nobody's Heroes tracks recorded in 1979 and 1980. Of these sets, my favorite is the middle four songs. I think the performances and songs are pretty good from that session. It also features the only somewhat-rarity on the disc, an early version of Nobody's Hero with inferior rough-draft lyrics. It's a shame the final revision had not taken place prior to this recording, because this is actually one of two songs on here that I feel are (or would otherwise be) superior to the official album versions. I've never liked the way Jake Burns sang the album version of Nobody's Hero (my wife said she thought it sounded like he was belching - I agree with this assessment. Plus I have some problems with the mixing).

The other song that benefits from a different performance is Doesn't Make it All Right. Again, the vocal performance here is superior to the album version, as the vocals on the final verse are less obnoxiously melodramatic.

Other than that, there's not anything here that you would need to hear if you already owned the first two albums (plus the Straw Dogs single, which is one of the better performances here, but not quite as fiery as the single version). The rendition of Suspect Device may be of interest if you (perhaps justifiably) hate the sound quality of the other recordings, but while it is better in some ways, I think I still prefer the other versions - even the single version that sounds like it was recorded on a portable tape recorder.

So, while this is an ok (not great) CD, it doesn't have much of a purpose. I'm giving it a 4/10.