Professional songwriting can be brutally unrewarding. The hit-making Midas touch that enthralled fans can suddenly misfire and disappear. And bad songs breed contempt, ignominy, or - worst of all - obsequious reassurances.
While the songwriting partnership of Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein retains a certain edge - with opener Doom or Destiny providing vintage, classic stylings - it may no longer be prolific. Most of the composition on ‘Pollinator’ has been outsourced, with Johnny Marr, Sia, Dev Hynes, Dave Sitek and the Strokes’ Nick Valensi chipping in with songwriting duties. The result is a superb Blondie album, their best in decades.
The brief is pretty clear: write brand new ‘long lost’ Blondie songs from their golden era, and let the band do the rest. Thus, tracks like Fragments, Already Naked and Long Time effortlessly recreate the distinctive chugging rhythm section, NYC punk riffs and floral synth sounds to satisfying effect.
Meanwhile, Harry’s gloriously insouciant vocals - now triple distilled into a sexy septuagenarian brew - find her rattling off occasionally pedestrian lyrics with a charisma only slightly weathered.
The lead single, Fun, is a hook-heavy, playful disco track. Harry’s doubled vocal provides that ethereal magic that continues to feel luminescent and diaphanous above the robotic rhythm. Actually, the most recent album to master that sound is probably Justice’s ‘Woman’, from last year. This is another record that retains the chemical excitement of peak disco, while updating the production tastefully.
Elsewhere, Love Level revisits some of the Latin flavours that occasionally crop up in Blondie’s catalogue. It’s a track that features some dubious spoken phrases: “What goes up must go down / Lookin’ at the love we found / Gotta get to you somehow / I can barely reach it now.” But it also demonstrates a fanboyish appreciation of the band’s oeuvre, and that’s something that gives the album legitimacy.
‘Pollinator’ is a long way from being groundbreaking, but it has a vintage and quality that has often escaped contemporaries such as the Stranglers, Duran Duran and Pretenders. In this regard, Blondie may have hit upon a defiantly effective formula for late career album craft.
Blondie Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Fri June 23 2017 - ST AUSTELL Eden Project
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