Only Sisters Can Do That

Album review

After a troubled, one-album affiliation with Motown Records, the Pointer Sisters entered into a troubled, one-album affiliation with SBK Records. That one album was Only Sisters Can Do That, on which producer/songwriter/synthesizer player Peter Wolf (not to be confused with the J. Geils Band singer), who had given Starship several hits, was intended to take over the job of group Svengali previously handled by David Rubinson and then Richard Perry. Wolf put together his typical, highly polished musical tracks, playing most of the instruments himself, over which the Pointers sang with their usual enthusiasm. The trouble was that pop production styles had moved to a more intricate, R&B-influenced sound typified by the hits of Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson, so that Wolf's tracks sounded out of date, and none of the compositions was sufficiently memorable to buck the tide. It didn't help that SBK, which had looked like a hot start-up label in the early 1990s with hits by Wilson Phillips, Vanilla Ice, and Jon Secada, was cooling off noticeably. Soon, the label was history and, with two consecutive non-charting albums, so were the Pointers as a current recording act.

© William Ruhlmann /TiVo