Consumer Guide Album

Blondie: Parallel Lines [Chrysalis, 1978]
As unlikely as it seemed three years ago, they've actually achieved their synthesis of the Dixie Cups and the Electric Prunes--their third is as close to God as pop-rock albums ever get, or got. Closer, actually--even on side two every song generates its own unique, scintillating glitz. What seems at first like a big bright box of hard candy turns out to have guts, feeling, a chewy center, and Deborah Harry's vocal gloss reveals nooks of compassion and sheer physical give that makes the protagonists of these too-too modern fragments seem as tragic (or untragic) as those of any other epoch. Plus the band really New Yawks it up--try the chorus of "Just Go Away." A