Blondie: The Curse Of Blondie

Blondie re-emerged after a 17-year break in 1999, poking its collective head out of the dirt a couple of years too soon. True, No Exit wasn't exactly the group's shining moment, but even if it were, it likely still would have been crushed under the heels of Britney and the Backstreets. Had Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, and company waited until now, when a generation of musicians and their fans have come to regard the late-'70s/early-'80s New York environment in which Blondie thrived as a lost golden age, it might have been more of an event. Hailing from a moment when downtown grit, uptown glamour, and all their representative musical styles mixed and mingled with abandon, Blondie may not have defined the era, but it clearly embodied it. Do any other band's greatest hits switch from disco to reggae to rap to girl-group pop quite as easily as Blondie's Does any band even try

Of course, that was then and this is now, but The Curse Of Blondie finds the group trying hard to recapture the freewheeling spirit of old. It's quite a leap between the free jazz and spoken-word theatrics of "Desire Brings Me Back" and the contemporarily packaged disco of "Good Boys," but The Curse Of Blondie makes it sound as if one naturally follows the other. Technically speaking, Blondie can't do it all, but its confidence makes the band seem like it can.

Whether, upon closer examination, Blondie does it all well is another question. Harry sounds relaxed breezing through "Undone" and "Good Boys," but making like Patti Smith on "Golden Rod" and riding a Led Zeppelin riff through "Last One In The World" doesn't really work for her. It's a valiant effort to try something new, or at least try some new old styles, but the real curse of The Curse Of Blondie is that it only occasionally approaches past greatness.