(LIVE NOW) BLONDIE Sync Listen - Eat to the Beat & Autoamerican

Call Me fits so handsomely on the album. Replace Follow Me with it and you have the perfect concise 13-tracker. I give it a 10 because I knew and loved it beforehand but that's not necessarily to say it's the best song here - I'd need to give the album a few more spins first, and I will. it's so good that these 8 minutes feel like a breeze :D

08 Europa
08 Live It Up
08 Here's Looking at You
09 The Tide is High
09 Angels on the Balcony
07 Go Through It
09 Do the Dark
09 Rapture
09 Faces
08 T-Birds
08 Walk Like Me
06 Follow Me
10 Call Me

The whole vibe feels like something Miley could capture if she really went for it with the hair-rock sound/look she's dipping her toes into. A great record :o I'm so impressed.
 
Forgot about this bit, was it not in the original?:

Take me out and show me
Put me on the scene
Dress me in the fashions
Of the NINETEEN EIIIGHTEEEEEEES
 
09 Europa
10 Live It Up
05 Here's Looking At You
10 The Tide Is High
08 Angels On The Balcony
09 Go Through It
09 Do The Dark
10 Rapture
06 Faces
08 T-Birds
07 Walk Like Me
08 Follow Me
--
10 Call Me
 
Was "Call Me" not on the original versions of the album? Seems like a massive missed opportunity to me if not, kind of how they left "Into the Groove" off Like a Virgin in the States
 
08 Europa
09 Live it Up
06 Here's Looking at You
08 The Tide is High
10 Angels on the Balcony
08 Go Through It
10 Do the Dark
10 Rapture
07 Faces
10 T-Birds
08 Walk Like Me
09 Follow Me

10 Call Me
 
Jark said:
Call Me fits so handsomely on the album. Replace Follow Me with it and you have the perfect concise 13-tracker. I give it a 10 because I knew and loved it beforehand but that's not necessarily to say it's the best song here - I'd need to give the album a few more spins first, and I will. it's so good that these 8 minutes feel like a breeze :D

08 Europa
08 Live It Up
08 Here's Looking at You
09 The Tide is High
09 Angels on the Balcony
07 Go Through It
09 Do the Dark
09 Rapture
09 Faces
08 T-Birds
08 Walk Like Me
06 Follow Me
10 Call Me

The whole vibe feels like something Miley could capture if she really went for it with the hair-rock sound/look she's dipping her toes into. A great record :o I'm so impressed.
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Are you familiar with Picture This from Parallel Lines? I need to hear her cover that.
 
"Suzy & Jeffrey" is very TOPICAL these days isn't it :D

VERY "Debbie Downer" lyrics but fabulous tune
 
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unrelated question to these two records - what is the version of Heart of Glass that Spotify has labelled "Heart of Glass - remix" from Parallel Lines deluxe remastered?
 
09 Europa
10 Live It Up
05 Here's Looking At You
10 The Tide Is High
08 Angels On The Balcony
09 Go Through It
09 Do The Dark
10 Rapture
06 Faces
08 T-Birds
07 Walk Like Me
08 Follow Me
--
10 Call Me
09 Suzy & Jeffrey
 
and @POP! what's best to explore next - Parallel Lines, or Plastic Letters?

@lolly not sure but got it queued!

07 Suzy & Jeffrey
 
Jark said:
and @POP! what's best to explore next - Parallel Lines, or Plastic Letters?

@lolly not sure but got it queued!

07 Suzy & Jeffrey
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Parallel Lines is a no-brainer unless you want to save it for last. Plastic Letters is a bit more rough around the edges (in a good way) and Parallel Lines is basically on every credible greatest pop albums of all time list.
 
Love re-discovering their catalog. I'd be up for a Plastic Letters/Parallel Lines sync next.
 
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In a weird way Autoamerican FLEW BY and Eat to the Beat felt much longer as a whole. As I said though, ETTB will always be my favorite Blondie album because of those three songs.
 
I got far more out of Autoamerican than I thought I would. Thanks POP!
 
Thanks everyone for joining... this was truly a pleasure.

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK FOR PLASTIC LETTERS AND PARALLEL LINES

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Actually, the Debbie Harry solo albums are an enticing prospect FULL STOP.
 
Autoamerican is probably my favourite Blondie album. You can tell they were really wanting to experiment with different genres and move outside their box, but it still manages to be pretty cohesive.

It struck just the right balance (unlike poor, wobbly The Hunter.)
 
lolly said:
Actually, the Debbie Harry solo albums are an enticing prospect FULL STOP.
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Indeed, even if we just do Rockbird and Def, Dumb and Blond in addition to Koo Koo. Debravation is fine but not for everyone, and the less said about Necessary Evil the better. :D
 
Debravation is the one I'm most interested in revisiting!
 
lolly said:
Debravation is the one I'm most interested in revisiting!
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It does have "Strike Me Pink" and "Rain" on it, which are some of my favorite solo Debbie tracks... I just find it a bit uneven on the whole but I guess that is what these syncs are meant to explore.
 
I know (and for a great part love) KooKoo and Def Dumb and Blonde, but Rockbird and Debravation i can barely recall at all outside the obvious.
 
I'm back on Autoamerican tonight - Here's Looking At You is really doing it for me. Also my straight boyfriend says it's "good for cooking to". Queen of jazz and sultry mango curry.
 
I’m pleased to see Autoamerican being judged so favourably here. I’ve always loved it but it got some horrible reviews :(
 
The Rolling Stone review of Autoamerican was particularly HATEFUL and full of personal attacks for NO REASON. "Promiscuously ETHNIC" has not aged too well either... can we cancel Rolling Stone?

Blondie’s Autoamerican is a terrible album, but it’s bad in such an arcane, high-toned way that listening to it is perversely fascinating. After Parallel Lines gave Chris Stein a carte blanche, it was only a matter of time until he started living out his fantasies of himself as a deep thinker. Since he could always be counted on to hedge his bets, however, he cannily managed to sustain the illusion that he still cared about rock & roll on Eat to the Beat. That illusion is surely dead now. And Stein is no longer depriving the world of his “genius,” because Autoamerican is his LP all the way. Indeed, it’s such an anthology of intellectual onanism that it’s almost the rock equivalent of a godawful Ken Russell movie.

A movie, in fact, is what the record transparently aspires to be. The conception, so far as I can figure it, treats American pop culture, or teenage subculture, in science-fiction terms as a kind of lost Atlantis: a legendary civilization made extinct by the disappearance of the surplus-goods society that fostered it. As an idea, this is one of those notions that feels like a cliché, even when you can’t think of anybody else who’s done it. It’s too easy, though certainly feasible, depending on how it’s worked out. Here, it hasn’t been worked out at all. The theme is just a convenient touchstone to unify a lot of fairly ephemeral material that’s patched together by a few repeated images and some graceless chunks of pretentious narration.

Autoamerican opens with an instrumental dirge called “Europa” (the Old World everybody had to leave, get it?) that’s ludicrously portentous. Scored in the pastiche style of wretched soundtrack music, it’s so promiscuously ethnic that, if it had characters, they’d all have to be played, in fortissimo, by Anthony Quinn. The album closes with nothing less than that classic anthem to solipsism, “Follow Me,” from Camelot (a reference as thuddingly clever as “Singin’ in the Rain” at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange). Oddly enough, there isn’t a single rock & roll song on the LP. Instead, we get MOR ballads wrapped in highbrow trimmings, funk played as cocktail music, an imitation-dub rap song and three (counting “Follow Me”) pieces of fake-Tin Pan Alley, swing-era crooning.

Even when camp isn’t the actual musical style, it’s still omnipresent as an attitude. As Stein expounds upon and fills his hobbies (art films, sci-fi, kitschy artifacts) with hot air, he deflates rock & roll in order to demonstrate his superiority to it. He’s so exclusively concerned with creating a modernist manifesto that he’s dispensed with all the pop paraphernalia — e.g., hooks, rhythm, structure — that keeps an audience listening. His sense of pop culture itself is rarefied and coldly elitest: everything, in short, that rock & roll joyfully meant to clear away. Why would anyone make an album about pop that’s totally devoid of humor, brashness, good times and physical energy? Who knows. (It’s as if the jaded, enervated rich of Last Year in Marienbad had passed the time by translating old Ronettes singles into French.) And while he’s expressing his contempt for pop, Chris Stein shamelessly embraces every snobbish cliché of current avant-garde thinking. The only things he seems to care about are the knowing little musical touches: the tinny, abstract-funk guitar lines borrowed from Talking. Heads, the tendentious panculturalism of it all.

You may be wondering what happened to Deborah Harry. Stein’s largest mistake — or, alternately, the clearest sign of his arrogance — is his willingness to shortchange Blondie’s biggest asset. It’s not just that Harry sounds foolish reciting Autoamerican‘s bits of narration — the way they’re written, so would Laurence Olivier. Her voice is all wrong for the tunes, too. She can’t project nonchalance, wit or verbal sophistication and is denied any chance to utilize that peculiar metallic urgency characteristically found in her finest vocals. Without opportunities, she seems lost, as if she’d wandered onto the wrong record. Even in the least stylized compositions, Harry sounds listless and dazed, barely there. And when she does try to show some sass and spunk — in the rap that (all too typically) gives “Rapture” its title — she’s sunk by the leaden, schematic lyrics.

The rest of the group is almost as absent: the star parts all go to the brand-name sessionmen brought in for the LP, and at least half the songs are carried by horns (Caribbean and bullfight) or strings (MOR and pseudoclassical). Though Blondie’s days as a sloppy but inspired trash-rock band are long gone (and more missed than ever), here the group doesn’t even get to trot out the bombastic AOR chops that producer Mike Chapman gave them as a substitute on Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat. Only “T-Birds” reaches for the old panache, and it’s stopped cold by another bit of limp exhortation.

Organist Jimmy Destri is awarded a moment or two, and his and Laura Davis’ ballad, “Angels on the Balcony,” while somewhat slight, is the album’s nicest and least abrasive number. Unfortunately, Destri is also responsible for one of Autoamerican‘s worst-conceived cuts: “Walk like Me,” a marching tune for a rebellion that you can’t imagine the band actually believes in. Aside from its musical shortcomings — the melody is too flat for the song to be as stirring as it means to be — the idea that the way for teenagers to revolt against society is to follow the example set by blondie™ for murjani™ is truly laughable. Or not funny at all.

Still, you have to prefer Destri’s attempts to make some connection with the outside world to Stein’s bloodless manipulation of it. The best thing about “Walk like Me” is that, on Autoamerican, it sounds out of place: it’s about something. For the rest, I wonder if the reason Chris Stein is so eager to proclaim the death of pop culture is so he can beat the hyenas to its bones.
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That review is appalling, but I will say this. Autoamerican was pretentious in that way only a band doing too much cocaine could ever be. It’s a step down from the two, nay, three, albums that preceded it and some of the production does border on the ridiculous. It feels bloated, over produced, often cold and messy and doesn’t hang that well together as an album to me. It confused people at the time wanting more bombastic pop music- my brother was a massive Blondie fan, with every 7/12/LP but he stopped at Autoamerican and sold his singles collection soon after, though he thankfully kept the albums, which was my first exposure. (As I’ve said elsewhere, there is a photo of me aged three with big can headphones on listening to Parallel Lines and poring over the sleeve).

Having said all of that, I like it. I didn’t even know it existed until I found a copy at a school jumble sale when I was about 10 and excitedly bought it to give to my older brother to add to his collection. I too was confused by it, but then I was aged 10 and far from the target audience. As an adult it’s joys have revealed themselves to me and its a solid album, a little too try hard in places, but with some interesting experiments and a couple of absolute nuggets. And this has encouraged me to play it, which I haven’t done in an age.

08 Europa
10 Live It Up
07 Here's Looking At You
08 The Tide Is High
07 Angels On The Balcony
08 Go Through It
07 Do The Dark
10 Rapture
06 Faces
08 T-Birds
07 Walk Like Me
07 Follow Me
--
10 Call Me
11 Suzy & Jeffrey
 
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Harry 'can't project nonchalance'? FUCK OFF. Did anyone ever do it BETTER?
 
And that review really does read as a huge personal attack on Stein, and simultaneously dismissive of everyone else involved. A lot of that criticism (if you agree with the review) should have been aimed at Mike Chapman as producer. And Stein wrote or co-wrote only five of the twelve tracks if Wikipedia is to be believed - the same as Harry.
 
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