Original Sinner: The Very Best of the MGM Recordings

Lou Christie's stay with MGM Records was pretty short, lasting only a little more than one year starting in late 1965. It did take in quite a bit of recording, however, including two albums and a bunch of singles, among them his chart-topping "Lightnin' Strikes." This collection assembles 22 MGM tracks, though it's likely that only "Lightnin' Strikes" and, perhaps, the controversial Top Twenty hit "Rhapsody in the Rain" (present here in both its censored and uncensored versions) will be familiar if you're not a Christie buff. As is so often the case when you go deeper than the obvious hits, not only is there nothing else here on the level of those two songs, but there's nothing else particularly striking, to make a bad pun. Most of the tunes are typical generic New York AM radio-ready pop/rock (well, they would have been ready for AM radio if they had hooks as strong as those in "Lightnin' Strikes"), heavy on the falsetto vocals by both Christie and shrill female backup singers, showing a debt or at least similarity to some of the mid-'60s work by the Four Seasons. Occasionally it departs a little from the formula, like on the lush '50s doo wop-inflected ballad "Diary"; the positively weird gypsy-rock hybrid of a few songs (including one, "Lita," represented by both the officially released version and a previously unissued alternate mix); and a few Jack Nitzsche-produced cuts with expectedly Phil Spector-esque orchestrations. The first-class packaging and liner notes make this a good investment for Christie fans, though lesser admirers will have all they want of his MGM recordings on greatest-hits collections.