Thalia Zedek, the singer-song-writer-guitarist whose edge-city emotional intensity is Come's driving force, fronted Live Skull in the late Eighties and before that the innovative Boston underground bands Uzi and Dangerous Birds. Her songs are personal, sometimes despairing, often pissed off, invariably gripping. And she brings off the rare feat of "singing the blues" entirely in her own voice,...

A lot of bands are painful to listen to simply because they're so bad, but Come administer an entirely different kind of aural agony. Fronted by Thalia Zedek, a lesbian ex-junkie who revels in lines like "The closer I get, the harder I get hit," Come translate feelings of alienation, dejection and depression into strung-out punk-blues songs that shiver with hopelessness and glimmer with raw...