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 Glass,” the members of Blondie reunited with producer Mike Chapman for a record that fearlessly ping-pongs between genres, attempting to mine power-pop gold from musical playthings both familiar (punk, girl groups, 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 soundtracks. Beyond the singles, there’s plenty of pop brilliance on <i>Eat To the Beat</i>, which finds the group playing around with as many sounds as possible: “Die Young Stay Pretty” is the band's attempt at a reggae song, one that successfully paves the way for the group's Caribbean-tinged monster hit “The Tide Is High.” The ballad "Sound-A-Sleep," meanwhile, twinkles like a lullaby, and “Slow Motion” is a Motown throwback. Not long after the release of <i>Eat To the Beat</i>, Blondie would find smash success by taking stabs at Eurodisco (“Call Me”), reggae-rock (“The Tide Is High”), and hip-hop (“Rapture”). But it was the restless genre experimentation on <i>Eat To the Beat</i> that made it clear Blondie was capable of anything.

via Apple Music