Date: 1 December 1983
Originally published in: Musik Express Sounds (Germany)
Written by: Stefan Svoboda
No surprises from the Wilde clan. “Love Blonde” did not in any way initiate a new direction, but was just a small deviation from the path of widely produced synth epics.
But in its genre, the songwriter team Marty / Ricky Wilde, the producer Ricky and the singer Kim are absolutely safe and unbeatable. The sound patterns sound powerful, the electro rhythm whips mercilessly through the dramatic songs. Passionate, but still cool, Kim offers the well-known, often contradictory cocktail of temperaments.
It has lost none of its charisma. On the contrary: whenever you might think that Brother Ricky had relied too much on the tried and tested, she made up for it with vocal surprises.
The basic mood of Catch as Catch Can is the misted discs and falling leaves, the overweight of the minor over the major chords is more blatant than Select, only “Love Blonde” falls out as a stylistic side jump, embedded between the super operas ‘Stay Awhile’ and ‘Dream Sequence’: a few more songs in this mood might not have been wrong.
While Kim Wilde was often compared to Deborah Harry in the past, today she is closer to the Abba ballads, even if Ricky’s compositions are tangled and varied. But kitsch has never been a mistake in pop music – and if anyone can convincingly sell sentimentality in such a mass form today, it is Kim Wilde.
