Eat To The Beat

About

Blondie's fourth album, 1979’s <i>Eat To the Beat</i>, followed the runaway success of the gleaming pop gambit <i>Parallel Lines</i>. After scoring a chart-topping smash with the disco experiment “Heart of Gla,” the members of Blondie reunited with producer Mike Chapman for a record that fearlessly ping-pongs between genre, attempting to mine power-pop gold from musical playthings both familiar (punk, girl group, Motown, disco) and new (reggae, funk, Ennio Morricone). The end result would be Blondie’s second platinum album. <i>Eat To the Beat</i> opens with what would become the album’s biggest hit: “Dreaming,” a luminous rocker inspired by ABBA's “Dancing Queen,” and anchored by the deliberately overplaying of Clem Burke, who provides some of the busiest, most unhinged drumming ever to appear on a pop single. The mid-tempo New Wave soar of <i>Eat To the Beat</i>’s second single, "Union City Blue," pulsates with yearning and melancholy; it's the type of Blondie song that Radiohead could cover, which the British group did in 1995. And the album’s third single, “The Hardest Part,” is a greasy funk-rock stomper about performing a heist on an armored car—as good a metaphor as any for a bunch of punk rockers infiltrating the major-label system. Then there's the album’s final single, the glittery, drum machine space-western party “Atomic”: Intended as the band's “last disco song,” it twangs along on a series of chords that band member Jimmy Destri intended as an ode to spaghetti western soundtrack. .

via Apple Music

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