Blondie
Parallel Lines

THE REVIEW

In 1978, perched on her plexiglass heels, the ultra-styled, designer-clad, and oh-so-cool Debbie Harry began to look with a bit of disdain at her old garage (rock) colleagues, tired of the dust in the usual basements and irresistibly drawn to the reflective quality of certain penthouse mirrors...
According to the most uncompromising contemporaries, this album was overwhelming evidence of a crime against the band, accused of betraying the raw rock'n'punk tinged with sixties frivolities of their beginnings, in favor of a shift (horror!) towards disco-music; today, with the fall of dunce caps and critical fences between good and bad genres, it seems the time has come to take this record off the Index...

Incidentally, due to inscrutable historical cycles, in 2005, there would be dozens of groups and bands willing to give up their vital organs to produce a similar collection of sparkling songs balancing between disco-wave and rock'n'roll. One must consider that an album like Parallel Lines could have been dismissed as "commercial" only in a time as rich in masterpieces as the New York years from '77 to '80...
Thus, the daunting task for Blondie was to open customs between pure New Wave and pop-dance "degenerations," the same customs that would be crossed in the following years by others (with different outcomes, including the Talking Heads and Patti Smith).
So here we are with the songs; a timeless Heart Of Glass still capable of driving the most mummified critics to the dance floor is balanced by the unexpected experimental breeze of the dark Fade Away And Radiate, with an unsuspecting Robert Fripp (this time in pocket version) fiddling with his loops... In between, there are nursery rhymes stuck like glue such as Pretty Baby, the irresistible 11:59 (...if only he could also sing!), the perfect lightness of I Know But I Don't Know and Hanging On The Telephone, all seasoned with a voice increasingly adept at juggling between apt meows, squeaks, and roars.

The perfect makeover of this Blonde will hold up splendidly for another handful of hits, thanks to the magical touch of Giorgio Moroder, then there will be other times, other fashions, other dark circles...