Blondie

The success of Parallel Lines saw the band vying to recreate some of that magic in the form of Eat To The Beat (1979). Still, some less-inspired Disco/rock numbers such as "Atomic" and "The Hardest Part" can't hide the fact that "Dreaming" is a great pop song and the album still stands strong.

Blondie has always been a band less concerned with weaving dreams than with critiquing
them in order to emphasize the distance between desire and fulfillment. They pioneered a
reverse-twist musical archivism that's antiromantic rather than escapist: instead of digging
for intact nuggets of nostalgia, Blondie went at pop tradition with a ball peen hammer,
splintering and rearranging shards of the past according to an up-to-date aesthet... More >

This makes it in the end, but not by much--a tour de force like Parallel Lines it ain't. The soft focus of the lyrics remains more evasive than profound or mysterious, and a lot of what replaces the diminished popcraft either wanders ("Sound-A-Sleep") or repeats experiments we've heard before ("Victor"). Then again, "Sound-A-Sleep" probably ought to wander, since it's about insomnia and the pushy organ hysterics of "Victor" are a gutsy move for a group that's supposed to have gone AOR. I don't like the overarching fatalism--me, I hope to die old and get ugly--but I do like the way the lyrics depart from pop bohemia to speak directly to the mass audience they're reaching. And Debbie just keeps getting better. (Grade - A-)