Blondie - s/t

Let me explain both the number of Blondie albums in my collection as well as the fact that I had not sat down to listen to them before now. I once belonged to a fantastic online forum of close-knit guys unified in a single hobby. One of those guys turned out to be Jimmy Destri, keyboardist for Blondie. He was a seriously awesome dude who left the forum a few months before I stopped coming around so much. Anyway, I felt the compulsive need to own the music (a decent amount of which he actually wrote) made by a guy I knew. I knew Blondie mainly for "Call Me" and "Heart of Glass." I was unfamiliar with pretty much everything else they had ever done, which is why I was so impressed with this album.

In the spirit of the recently released American Graffiti, Blondie's self-titled debut hearkens back to the girl groups from the dawn of rock and roll. There's a certain innocence and altruism to that type of music, and Blondie captured that same spirit on this album. I don't know if I had heard a single song from this album before last week, but I think I would have remembered. Only two of these songs made it onto Blondie's Greatest Hits, but that doesn't matter to me. I love them all. From the doo-wop of "In the Flesh" to the B-52's-esque oddity of "Attack of the Giant Ants." I liked this album a lot more than I thought I was going to.