Blondie: Eat To The Beat (CD+DVD Edition) CD Track Listing

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Blondie Eat To The Beat (CD+DVD Edition) (1979)
Eat To The Beat (CD+DVD Edition)\n\nOriginally Released October 1979\nRemastered Edition Released September 11, 2001\nCD+DVD Edition Released June 26, 2007 \n\nAMG EXPERT REVIEW: Just as Blondie's second album, Plastic Letters, was a pale imitation of their debut, Blondie, Eat to the Beat, their fourth album, was a secondhand version of their breakthrough third album, Parallel Lines: one step forward, half a step back. There was an attempt, on such songs as "The Hardest Part" and "Atomic," to recreate the rock-disco fusion of the group's one major U.S. hit, "Heart of Glass," without similar success, and elsewhere, the band just tried to cover too many stylistic bases. The British, who had long since been converted, made Eat to the Beat another chart-topper, but in the U.S., which still saw Blondie as a slightly comic one-hit wonder, the album was greeted for what it was -- slick corporate rock without the tangy flavor that had made Parallel Lines such ear candy. -- William Ruhlmann\n\nHalf.com Album Credits\nDave Tickle, Engineer\nPeter Coleman, Engineer\nMike Chapman, Producer\n\nAlbum Notes\nBlondie: Frank Infante (vocals, guitar); Jimmy Destri (vocals, keyboards); Deborah Harry (vocals); Chris Stein (guitar); Nigel Harrison (bass); Clem Burke (drums).\n\nAdditional personnel: Randy Hennes (harmonica); Elle Greenwich, Lorna Luft, Donna Desta, Mike Chapman (background vocals).\n\nRecorded at the Power Station, Electric Lady Studio and Media Sound, New York, New York.\n\n1979's EAT TO THE BEAT was Blondie's fourth album, and the first to follow the enormous commercial breakthrough of 1978's PARALLEL LINES. Though its singles, the brilliant "Dreaming" and the disco-influenced "Atomic," were lesser hits than PARALLEL LINES' "Heart of Glass" and "One Way or Another," EAT TO THE BEAT's success cemented Blondie's status as by far the most commercially viable of the first wave of New York punk bands. \n\nBy this time, the band's always-tenuous connection to punk was barely noticeable; the artsy "Victor," the Springsteen-ish "Union City Blue," written for the soundtrack of Debbie Harry's first film, Steeltown, and the reggae-tinged "Die Young Stay Pretty" are early evidence of the sort of casual genre-hopping which defined the band's next album, AUTOAMERICAN. The ripping title track, "Accidents Never Happen" and the dreamy "Living in the Real World," however, are more typical Blondie fare.\n\n\nROLLING STONE REVIEW\nBlondie 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 aesthetic. Familiar fragments conjured up classic fantasies -- a series of teen dreams and B movies, all of them starring Deborah Harry -- while the pared-down context underscored their irrelevance. Singing like either a petulant baby doll or a Thorazined waif, Harry modeled pop images, then ripped them to shreds.\n\nWith each LP, Blondie has updated their musical mosaic by assimilating another chunk of pop history. Plastic Letters added touches of neopsychedelic electronics to the mock-girl-group sound of the band's debut. The repackaging and refinements of last year's Parallel Lines helped reduce Blondie's we-know-better-now perspective from the larger-than-life campiness of their early work to a subtler, eyebrow-raised irony: a level of detachment perfectly calculated to let the group play it both ways with a discofied song like "Heart of Glass."\n\nSmart, smirky and elating as those albums were, they had the unsatisfying feel of schoolwork turned in by a brilliant dilettante whose greatest effort went toward maintaining a stance of noncommittal, deathless cool that guarded against expectations while holding back energy for a future, more worthy challenge.\n\nAlone among the bands that emerged from the mid-Seventies New York punk-club circuit, Blondie has always regarded success as necessary, well deserved and inevitable. You got the feeling that if Deborah Harry and Chris Stein didn't become famous as rock stars, they'd gain fame as something else.\n\nWith Eat to the Beat, all that smug certainty has been vindicated. Faced with the challenge of following up the million-selling Parallel Lines, Blondie has delivered a record that's not only ambitious in its range of styles, but also unexpectedly and vibrantly compelling without sacrificing any of the group's urbane, modish humor. As if to distinguish Blondie from the pop revival they helped catalyze, Eat to the Beat subjugates melody to momentum: in their construction and in Mike Chapman's dense, crystalline production, most of the tracks are organized around Clem Burke's superb drumming. The new LP is -- purposefully, I think -- less overtly hooky than Parallel Lines, exchanging that album's cool self-possession for an engaging neuroticism. If hooks are the small revelations of rock & roll, then the beat is its obsession.\n\nBlondie's obsession here is with dreams and distance--the band's usual themes, now suddenly personalized by its own success. Like a comedian who outlasts and outclasses the subjects of his impressions, the group itself has become a pop image as powerful as any it can invoke. Blondie has invariably recognized the resonances that stardom has from without: Jimmy Destri's "Fan Mail" on Plastic Letters captures perfectly the lightheaded devotion of hero-worship. Now they're comparing perspectives. Without ever approaching a music-biz clich

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