goofs and French fluff -- the ugly truth was advanced in the prettiest way: This music had never been anything but contagious, glossy melodics ("pop"), some of which one could dance to (argh, "disco").

Parallel Lines made a hash of the genre distinctions that kept snobs warm. Guitar-god posturing is toyed with and discarded on "I Know but I Don't Know," East Village sass spat out like chicken bones on "Just Go Away." The melting, metallic "Sunday Girl" features Debbie Harry's voice at its thickest and most cynically sweet, proving she was always a one-girl girl group in Candie's. "11:59" has the cheesy organ break and fugitive scheme that later became the stuff of send-ups, but its trench-coat posturing is less caricatured than desperate.

Parallel Lines is infused with a new, and appropriate, romantic fatalism. Jack Lee's two songs -- the backstage lament "Will Anything Happen" and the immortal, breathless "Hanging on the Telephone" -- established Harry's persona firmly between vulnerable but skeptical lover and pop tigress. Nice young couple Harry and Chris Stein wrote (with Jimmy Destri) the tenderest New Wave love song put to vinyl, "Picture This," in which Harry smolders with longing by degrees, then crabbily hangs up the phone. In "Pretty Baby," she's already mourning, with infinite empathy, the fleeting blossom of someone else's youth. As for that maddening, damnable disco number, it's not propelled by dithery space keyboards or the inimitable circular rhythm, but by Clem Burke's swishing cymbal work, which hits all the heart-bursting peaks that Harry's ice-cream-cool vocals won't. (RS 842)

Further Listening:
Blondie (1976) FOUR STARS
Plastic Letters (1977) FOUR STARS
Eat to the Beat(1979) FOUR STARS

ARION BERGER