Frampton [Remaster]

Peter Frampton exited Humble Pie because that group fell into a loud, hard rock groove that overwhelmed the technical skills he'd spent years working on as a guitarist; he poured a lot of that into this highly melodic mid-tempo rock album. In the days before it saturated the airwaves in the version from Frampton Comes Alive, "Show Me the Way" was just a nice, very pleasant love song that benefited from a mix of acoustic and electric guitar textures spun out over a great beat and some excruciatingly memorable hooks, vocal and instrumental. It was surrounded by a lot more like it, including "Baby, I Love Your Way" in its original studio form, "The Crying Clown," "Nowhere's Too Far (For My Baby)," and most of the rest, although apart from the two hits, the playing and singing is often better than the songs themselves. This prevents the Frampton album from being a true classic, but it is one of the better albums from its all-too-mellow era. ~ Bruce Eder