Blondie - Pollinator

The Guardian 80

(BMG)

It doesn’t bode well when formerly prolific bands reach for outside songwriters, but a cast stretching from Johnny Marr to Sia to Charli XCX and the Strokes’ Nick Valensi have helped recreate Blondie’s classic late-1970s band sound, albeit with a modern sheen. Clem Burke’s trademark machine-gun drumming propels songs with teasingly familiar big hooks and earworm choruses.

Four writers – including TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek – collaborate on Fun’s Chic-style disco-funk. However, the old Chris Stein/Debbie Harry partnership contributes excellent opener Doom Or Destiny, sung with Joan Jett. Love Level has a glorious pop brass riff. Already Naked and When I Gave Up on You find Harry at her most warm and emotional.

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For decades, Blondie’s weapon has been their talent for synthesis. While tracks like “One Way or Another” and “Hanging on the Telephone” front-loaded themselves with spiky riffs and Debbie Harry’s petulant yet wondrous vocals, other entrants in the New York New Wavers’ catalog got their power—and staying power—from places removed from what was then considered “rock.” “Heart of Glass” added disco’s bounce to the band’s guitar crunch; their cover of the rocksteady classic “The Tide is High” made plain the Caribbean influences that were infiltrating rock in the late ’70s and early ’80s; “Dreaming” was an urban-cowboy sigh reclining on a cloud of glitter; and Harry’s downtown-blasé, Fab 5 Freddy-saluting bridge on “Rapture” led to it becoming the first rap video to appear on the white-breadiest, earliest iteration of MTV.

From the title on down, Blondie makes it clear that Pollinator, their 11th album, is full of outside ideas—only two of its 11 songs were co-written by Harry and Blondie’s longtime guitarist/Harry’s songwriting foil Chris Stein. Collaborators include of-the-moment gurus like Dev Hynes and Dave Sitek as well as pop workhorses like Sia and Charli XCX; keyboardist Matthew Katz-Bohen, who joined the band in 2008, also co-wrote a pair of tracks, while John Congleton (St. Vincent, Goldfrapp) handled production.

Although it has its moments, the end result is predictably uneven. Blondie’s commitment to tense and jumpy pop remains, even though Harry’s voice is more grounded some four decades after the band’s debut. Pollinator opens with the Harry/Stein rocker “Doom or Destiny,” which chugs along on a simple, brain-Velcro riff and is full of winking wordplay; Congleton gives Harry’s lower-register vocals a metallic sheen that makes the rapid-fire internal rhymes sound playfully robotic. “Long Time,” which Harry co-wrote with Hynes, is a downshifted “Heart of Glass” with seen-it-all lyrics; the blooming keyboards buried in the mix provide a counterweight to Harry’s heavily processed vocals.

Fellow New Wave lifer Johnny Marr penned the muscular, urgent “My Monster,” one of the album’s highlights. Harry’s voice gets to peek out from the digital-processing curtain as guitars and keyboards zip around her. Charli XCX—one of the better 21st-century pop artists operating in Harry’s spirited yet serious style—wrote “Gravity,” a spaced-out synthpop romp that allows Harry to vamp and pout. The album nears dudsville with the Sia Furler/Nick Valensi co-write “Best Day Ever” because even though its synths sparkle, Furler’s lyrics-by-numbers are far too 101 for Harry’s wise persona. (Perhaps a verse en Français would have helped.)

Two of the album’s more unexpected collaborations wind up being its high points. The other Harry/Stein co-write, “Love Level,” opens as a swaggering pop-reggae hybrid then amps up the intensity as John Roberts (the comedian best-known as Linda on “Bob’s Burgers”) enters the fray, which quickly crests into a dancefloor cacophony. “Fragments,” meanwhile, is a seven-minute, blown-out cover of a 2010 piano ballad by the Vancouver musician (and movie blogger) Adam Johnston. In its original form it’s a slow-burn romantic broadside with knotty lyrics (“egocentricity,” “reality,” and “disparity” all fit into a verse that also contains the phrase “overwhelming rejection”); Blondie’s version surrounds Harry with guitar fuzz and breakneck drumming, allowing her to fully lean into a torchy vocal performance that culminates in her showing off her weathered, still-intact higher register as she laments that she doesn’t even remember. It’s part “Is That All There Is,” part defiant wave goodbye—and it’s a fitting close to an album that shows one of the most crucial American rock bands searching for footing in a chaotic, collapsible pop landscape.

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It’s now a full two decades since they reformed after a 15-year break, and Pollinator is their third album in six years - a marked improvement on a return of just two records between 1997 and 2011. That said, though, this follow-up to 2014’s Ghosts of Download is a broadly collaborative affair, with the group’s songwriting core of Debbie Harry and Chris Stein having penned just two of the eleven tracks here. Instead, they’ve deferred to a host of other musicians - many of them household names in their own right - and when you consider that those include the likes of Charli XCX, Sia and Dev Hynes, there’s no question they’re taking an admirable stab at a genuinely contemporary pop LP.

This post-millennium Blondie is, of course, a considerably different proposition entirely to their late Seventies and early Eighties heyday. On classic LPs like Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat, there was always a sense of intra-band democracy; as much as Harry and Stein were always the main players, a quick look over the liner notes confirms that the other members of the classic lineup – keyboardist Jimmy Destri, bassist Nigel Harrison, guitarist Frank Infante – were involved in the composition of the songs too. Since 2011’s Panic of Girls, new keys man Matt Katz-Bohen has taken on a key writing role, with drummer Clem Burke the only other mainstay from the Seventies.

The BBC documentary One Way or Another, which aired in 2006 and followed the band as they prepared to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, captured an excruciating onstage stand-off at the ceremony between Harry on one side and Destri, Harrison and Infante on the other, with the ousted trio upset at having been excluded from the evening’s performance. The same show suggested the singer and Stein barely tolerate Burke’s fondness for showmanship and you’d have been forgiven for wondering if the perspex screen around his kit was there to stop Harry strangling him. Perhaps it’s little wonder that they ultimately chose to look further afield for a wide-ranging cast of helping hands this time out.

It’s worth noting that it isn’t just the present-day nature of the supporting cohort here that sets them apart; it’s that they’re all either pop songwriters or at the very least have a penchant for that sort of approach. Sia and Charli XCX are both well-versed in sculpting chart hits for megastars by this point, and the latter’s contribution is a standout, as an assured groove anchors off-kilter synths. It’s a bit of a shame, then, that it’s immediately followed by the stodgy, one-track ‘When I Gave Up on You’. Blondie always were a pop group, regardless of how many punk icons they kept the company of in their CBGBs pomp, and the opening four tracks on Pollinator are telling in that respect; all are hook-driven, all put melody before all else and both ‘Long Time’ and ‘Fun’ - the former a joint effort from Harry and Hynes, the latter co-scribed by Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio - are irresistible.

The factor that ultimately defines Pollinator is both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness; it’s clear that they’re thoroughly revered by all of their collaborators here. It feels as if, because of that, everybody’s tried to write them a song that sounds like classic Blondie - fine, when it’s ‘Long Time’ or ‘My Monster’, the second of which longtime devotee Johnny Marr chipped in with. The problem is that this aim doesn’t always come off, and the feeling you’re left with is that maybe, for example, Sia and The Strokes’ Nick Valensi should’ve been trying for something a bit more forward-facing than ‘Best Day Ever’. That’s not to say that Blondie have simply chosen to lap up the adulation here; they’re obviously picky, with Future Islands’ Samuel T Herring talking in a recent interview about how Harry kept him on pins about whether she’d cut vocals for the track ‘Shadows’ on their latest record (in the end, she did, and it’s the best track on the album by a distance).

It should be said, too, that the punchy production from John Congleton, who returns behind the desk, suits twenty-first century Blondie down to the ground. Maybe the album’s highlight is the closer, though. It can’t be a coincidence that ‘Fragments’ feels like one of the few cuts that isn’t in thrall to the band’s golden era. What Pollinator does confirm is that there’s plenty left in the tank from Harry and Stein; next time, they might better realise that surrounding yourself with bright young things can often be the same as surrounding yourselves with your fans - and that they might well try too hard to please you.

The Guardian 60

(BMG)

Forty years into their career and Blondie are still prepared to push boundaries. Their 11th studio album comprises a series of collaborations with high-profile guests, the results adding a 21st-century electronic sheen to the glossy 70s new wave with which they made their name. Dev Hynes drops shards of Heart of Glass into Long Time; recent single Fun, with TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek at the helm, sounds uncannily like Scissor Sisters at their most disco; Johnny Marr co-writes and adds guitar to My Monster, and Charli XCX and Sia also feature elsewhere. Yet despite the divergent inputs, Pollinator still has the feel of a coherent album that’s enjoyable, if hardly essential.