Blondie

With Blondie already huge in the U.K., FM radio added the radically cool "One Way Or Another" and "Hanging On The Telephone" to their playlists, just before "Heart of Glass" became a global smash. The rest of the album brims over with the retro rock chic that defined their first two platters (though Americans bought this one). The CD adds bonus cuts.

In Blondie's third album, Parallel Lines, the band drops the brooding artiness of its previous
records and comes on like an ambitious pop-rock group. Or rather, a rock & roll band with
an ambitious pop vocalist named Deborah Harry. In the past, Harry has always managed to
make a virtue of her stiff, severe crooning, and her vocals complemented Blondie's
clipped, urban-raw playing. But the melodies were frequently lugubrious and m... More >

As unlikely as it seemed three years ago, they've actually achieved their synthesis of the Dixie Cups and the Electric Prunes--their third is as close to God as pop-rock albums ever get, or got. Closer, actually--even on side two every song generates its own unique, scintillating glitz. What seems at first like a big bright box of hard candy turns out to have guts, feeling, a chewy center, and Deborah Harry's vocal gloss reveals nooks of compassion and sheer physical give that makes the protagonists of these too-too modern fragments seem as tragic (or untragic) as those of any other epoch. Plus the band really New Yawks it up--try the chorus of "Just Go Away." (Grade - A)