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Album num­ber three was a bit of a rough patch for Kim Wilde: it didn’t notch up as many sin­gles for Kim in the U.K. as its pre­de­ces­sors, the label forced an outside-written sin­gle on it that stiffed and the result­ing album sim­ply isn’t as well-liked among fans as the albums that pre­ceded or fol­lowed.  However, none of that means Catch As Catch Can is a bad album.  It’s actu­ally an enter­tain­ing if incon­sis­tent piece of work that shows Wilde gear­ing up for a shift in musi­cal direction.

There were two sin­gles from Catch As Catch Can and both found Wilde push­ing her sound into new areas.  The first was “Love Blonde,” a pop con­fec­tion that bypassed moody new wave sounds and themes for a jazzy 1950’s-style melody (think “Stray Cat Strut” by way of Peggy Lee’s “Fever”) and a tongue-in-cheek lyric that sends up the image of the dumb blonde.  It’s a play­ful, frothy lit­tle tune that is the polar oppo­site of past sin­gles like “View From A Bridge” and “Child Come Away.” It scored just out­side the top-20 chart and deserved better.

The sec­ond sin­gle failed to reach such heights: “Dancing In The Dark” in a bub­blegum synth-dance ditty forced on Wilde by the label.  It’s com­pe­tent but kind of dull, the kind of anony­mous sin­gle that any­one could have recorded.  The one really inter­est­ing thing about it is its sound — though almost entirely elec­tronic, it fore­goes any new-wave affec­ta­tions in favor of a pure dance-minded elec­tron­ica that falls some­where between Hi-NRG and Italo-disco.  It stalled out­side the top-50 area of the pop charts but it inter­est­ingly pre­fig­ures the dance fare she’d be scor­ing with a few years later.

The rest of the album harkens back to the kind of mate­r­ial on Wilde’s first two albums.  For starters, there are story songs with a dark edge: “House Of Salome” is a fable-style tale of a man in the grip of an all-consuming love and “Sing It Out For Love” is a tear­jerker about the dis­il­lu­sion felt by a tour­ing female musi­cian whose life is a series of hole-in-the-wall bars.  There’s also some straight­for­ward new wave fare with a sci-fi tinge: “Dream Sequence” in a solid exper­i­men­tal track that allows brother Ricky Wilde to stretch out with his syn­the­siz­ers and “Shoot To Disable” uses horror-movie elec­tron­ica to under­score its omi­nous breakup-as-a-gunfight lyri­cal metaphor.

Catch As Catch Can isn’t as album-minded as past ven­tures — the sin­gles don’t really cohere with the album tracks — but the syn­thy pro­duc­tion and Wilde’s vocals keep it enter­tain­ing.  It’s the kind of album that might not grab the new wave fan on first lis­ten but it has some deep-album tracks that dig into the mem­ory with repeated lis­tens: for instance, “Stay Awhile” and “Can You Hear It” are nicely-layered bal­lads that grow in appeal with addi­tional spins.  It’s also worth noth­ing that both tracks show Wilde and her brother-dad writing/production team drift­ing away from new wave.  Wilde’s future would lie in a more con­ven­tional forms of dance-pop and bal­ladry and this album cap­tures the turn­ing point where that was obvi­ously sink­ing in for her and her team.

(CD Notes: this has been reis­sued by Cherry Pop and its another strong entry in their Kim Wilde reis­sue series.  The book­let offers an essay, lyrics and anno­ta­tions by Kim and Marty and it’s a worth­while read.  Better yet, the bonus tracks include two addi­tional ver­sions each for “Dancing In The Dark” and “Love Blonde” plus a fun b-side called “Back Street Driver” that cross­breeds new wave and rock in an OTT style.)