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.