Today was my first day back at
work after eleven days of holiday time.
The shift back to work comes more
opportunity to listen to music within the rules of the Odyssey (newbies can
read these on the sidebar to the right).
Disc 692 is…. Plastic Letters
Artist: Blondie
Year of Release: 1977
What’s up with the Cover? The band loafs
about on a police squad car. This seems to be a bad idea and I expect they will
all be arrested for their irreverence.
How I Came To Know It: I had a couple Blondie albums
and liked them both, so this was just me taking a chance on something else in
their catalogue.
How It Stacks Up: I have three of Blondie’s studio albums. I’ll put “Plastic
Letters” second, just ahead of “Automerican” but well behind the classic “Parallel
Lines.”
Rating: 3 stars
Blondie has always been a great band for blending a
lot of different musical influences into a sound unique to them. “Plastic
Letters” is early on their career and while good it would be fair to see the
blender hasn’t completed its work.
Of the three albums I have, this is the most punk rock,
with a raw (and occasionally directionless) energy that is missing from later
records. It could probably use a little more direction, and with all of the
different things it is trying to do, it occasionally feels like you are running
on a musical hamster wheel.
“Youth Nabbed
as a Sniper” and “Contact in Red
Square” are both cool songs, but they are one step away from being awesome.
Usually it is a step the band took when they shouldn’t have. I think it relates
to the synth organs.
But Logan, you say, those synth elements help make
the band the New Wave pioneers that they are. That’s true, but for some reason
these synth-pop elements are a distraction to the energy of the record. With
all its cold war grimness, I think I just want it to stay rough around the edges.
For all that punk energy “Plastic Letters” is a pop
music record at its core, with melodies at their core that are all bubble gum
and beach party, and that side of the band’s personality also works.
This includes “Denise”
(masculinized to “Denis”) and “Love at the Pier” which unlike “Denise” isn’t a sixties doo wop remake,
but still sounds like it belongs in a California beach movie. If those movies
had been cool, that is.
I also enjoyed the muscle-car inspired “Detroit 442” which is all about the
racing scene and feels like an update to Dick Dale’s hot rod music of fifteen
years earlier, with a healthy dose of seventies cynicism. Listening to “Detroit 442” I wasn’t sure if Harry was
celebrating hot rod culture or mocking it – I suspect the latter, but I liked
it anyway.
The album’s opening (and best) track “Fan Mail” is about little more than a
fan with a crush and dreams of achieving a stardom of his own. Despite this,
the song is cleverly constructed, with Harry’s voice starting low down and
seductive and morphing its way into an almost animalistic growl by the end. Odd
additional production, including actual bells ringing as Harry sings about
bells ringing (one or the other would suffice) can’t take away how great this
song is, or how much fun you have listening to it.
My copy of the CD is a ‘bonus track’ album –
something I often dread. Despite now clocking in at 17 tracks, the album stays
under 47 minutes. And of the four added songs, only one (the live version of “Detroit 442”) feels like a weak link.
In fact, there is a 1975 version of “Heart of Glass” (called “Once I Had a Love (aka the Disco Song)”)
that is different from the version eventually recorded for “Parallel Lines” but
just as good. “Scenery” and “Poet’s Problem” are both songs I’d have
kept on the original album at the expense of something else. I particularly
like “Scenery” which was originally an
outtake from the band’s eponymous debut.
“Plastic Letters” has all of the sounds that make “Parallel
Lines” such a classic, but doesn’t pull it all together at once. Instead you get
a collection of good songs, but none great, each sufficiently different from
one another that the album feels a bit like a whole collection of outtakes.
Kind of like Pearl Jam’s “Lost Dogs” or Tom Waits’ “Brawlers, Bawlers andBastards.” Fortunately, it is a good collection – like playing a whole
bunch of old 45s without having to get up and change the record every three
minutes.
Best tracks: Fan Mail, Denis, Bermuda
Triangle (Flight 45), (I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence Dear, I Didn’t Have
the Nerve to Say No, Detroit 442, Scenery
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