Music Review: Workin’ Our Way Back Through The Four Seasons Catalog - Part One - Page 2

Second half, Born to Wander (subtitled "Tender And Soulful Ballads [Folk Flavored]"), was recorded for the new label and is a much more consistently constructed collection. Acoustic guitar plays more prominently than ever before. In place of the hand-clapping orchestrations that embellished the Vee-Jay hits is a frequently sparer sound reminiscent of the Kingston Trio. The quartet even covers the Trio's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

Not all of the boys' attempts at aping the chart-topping folk poppers work – it's just plain odd to hear these tenderfeet singing, "get along little pony," let alone pretending to be returning Confederate soldiers – but the bulk of 'em do, even if the inclusion of a Beach Boys-inflected ballad entitled "No Surfin' Today" near the end of the platter seems puzzlingly out of place. Wander's centerpiece track for most fans will be "Silence Is Golden" (originally recorded as a B-Side to "Rag Doll"). With its evocative sliver of trembling electric guitar and soaring harmonies, "Silence" is a masterwork of high-pitched heartbreak, superior in every way to the imitative hit version released by Brit-poppers the Tremeloes a year later. While I wouldn't recommend this two-fer disc as the first choice for neophyte Seasonal explorers, it remains a solid set of tunes.

The same can't, unfortunately, be said for CCM’s second pair of reissues, 1965's Entertain You and On Stage With. Platter two's the sticking point: a faux concert album released by Vee-Jay to grab the band's fans one more time. Perhaps if the material had been fake live remakes of the group's hits, the company might've been onto something. But instead, On Stage's material is supper club schlock: show tunes (an non-ironic "Brotherhood of Man," "Just in Time"), movie tunes ("Blues in the Night"), pop fluff ("Jada") plus an excruciating "comic" routine entitled "How Do You Make A Hit Song." While this material may've flown back when the group was starting out – listen to Frankie's recitation in the middle of "My Mother's Eyes" and you can imagine a room fulla geezers happily weeping over their veal platters – it definitely smacked of mercenary desperation by ‘65.

If you're willing to think of On Stage as a set of largely irrelevant bonus tracks tacked onto the end of Entertain You, though, the package is probably more satisfying. Entertain opens with a triptych of show-centered tracks: two devoted to the tried-&-true metaphor of putting on a game show biz face through a broken heart, the third a surprisingly effective cover of Lionel Bart's "Where Is Love?" which shows that Valli & Company could do show tunes without tamping down their own identities. A strong thematic opening.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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