Blondie - The Hunter CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

(as in think, ponder, ruminate) as opposed to emotively (as in get up, dance, involve yourself).

This is a far cry from the ebullient Bowery-gone-big-time pop of Blondie's first four albums. Nowadays, Blondie aims to strike a cool, inscrutable pose anytime a shutter is clicked, or a thirty-two-track machine turned on. In short, the band has supplanted its rock & roll wit with acres of brow-furrowing attitude. Yet the group is loathe to surrender completely the clout that chart-topping singles and platinum LPs have allowed it: amid the offbeat stylistic jumble of The Hunter, we find Blondie carefully hedging their bets, offering what amounts to cloned versions of the hits from Autoamerican. "Island of Lost Souls" is the new LP's "The Tide Is High," complete with Ricky Ricardo horns, steel drums and jaunty ska beat. And "The Beast" is this album's rap number, ostensibly about a Godzilla-like creature whose nighttime peregrinations through a trendy urban underground are not far afield from those of his guitar-munching counterpart in "Rapture." Though Harry's pancultural heart is in the right place, her rap diction is about as convincing as, say, trying to imagine Dick Clark belting out "Soul Man."

Despite their transparent Top Forty aspirations, these two songs do play into the record's overall concept. In the main, The Hunter describes an urban Babylon (Blondie's Manhattan?), summoning the lush, exotic imagery of jungles and desert isles, with all of their virile, teeming abundance. On The Hunter, Blondie has moved from a heart of glass to the heart of darkness, their churning, insistent rhythms navigating you down an Amazon River of the mind. "Orchid Club" summons you with tribal drumming that commences low, like something heard downriver, and then gets louder, as if you'd chanced upon some weird fertility rite. Soon, you catch the tantalizing fragrance of sin and temptation: it's there in the forbidden fruit found on "Island of Lost Souls" and "Orchid Club"; in the city hustler's patois of "The Beast"; in the paranoid daydreams of violence that undergird "War Child"; and in the speed-freak sci-fi fantasy of "Dragonfly." All of this pungent erotica finds a unifying metaphor in the album's final track,

Released only a year after Autoamerican but their time at the top already seemed like it happened in the distant past. A contractual obligation LP (the broken-up band had to record this), "War Child" was a UK hit and "English Boys" is a well-written number that captures some of their former glory, but this is pretty dispiriting. An ignoble end to a great band.