Blondie - Greatest Hits (CD+DVD)
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Free Music Notes for Greatest Hits (CD+DVD)
Free Music Review: great
Hit: 5 Stars
this is great CD+DVD I like everything.These are theirs early videos, and price is good too.Picture and sound are very good. Thank you Amazon.Free Music Review: Blondie-Greatest Hits/cd with dvd
Hit: 5 Stars
I am thrilled with both the dvd and cd of this collection of Blondie's work. I especially enjoyed the remix of In the Flesh and Good Boys.Free Music Review: Blondie Greatest Hits (CD & DVD)
Hit: 5 Stars
Fantastic!!! The best songs and the best videos.Free Music Review: Fantastic, but far from perfect...
Hit: 4 Stars
Blondie is my favorite band and I have all of their albums, so I was curious to compare this collection with their first hits collection, The Best of Blondie (1982), and their other Greatest Hits album from 2002.
Sound & Vision is much better than The Best of Blondie, with vastly improved sound quality and a bigger selection of songs. The only songs that The Best of Blondie contains that this collection does not are "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear" and the original version of "In the Flesh"--the version of the latter on Sound & Vision is an awful remix with brand new vocals by Debbie Harry, and it sounds NOTHING like the original. Sound & Vision is certainly preferable to The Best of Blondie, though, no matter how you look at it.
However, when compared to the 2002 Greatest Hits CD, Sound & Vision doesn't fair quite as well, not taking into account the bonus DVD with music videos. Greatest Hits has nearly every song from this collection--it does NOT include "Good Boys" or "End To End" from The Curse of Blondie, released in 2004, nor the "Rapture Riders" mash-up, but makes up for it with the inclusion of "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear" and "X Offender", two of Blondie's best songs. It also includes the original version of "In the Flesh" in lieu of the pointless remix. Those factors alone, along with the fact that Greatest Hits is quite a bit cheaper than this collection, make Greatest Hits worth getting instead of Sound & Vision.
So, how does Sound & Vision hold up on its own? It is a decent collection of Blondie's most popular songs, but they are mostly radio edits and not the full album versions. They even dared to chop off the openings of "Heart of Glass", Atomic" and "The Tide is High"! The remix included for "Good Boys" is decent, and much MUCH better than the remix for "In the Flesh", but the album version is still the best. The remastering is swell, but in some cases I prefer the remasters of the original album versions (for example, "Union City Blue").
If you're a diehard Blondie fan like me, you will want Sound & Vision for the bonus DVD, which includes some of Blondie's best music videos. These are not traditional music videos because they were all produced before MTV, but rather they are performance videos of the band lip-synching to the studio versions of the songs. My personal favorite of the videos is "Rapture", but "Heart of Glass", "Denis", "Hanging on the Telephone", "Dreaming" and "The Hardest Part" are favorites as well. The worst of them by far is "The Tide of High"--love the song, but the video is T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E.
Most casual listeners will not be concerned with the things I am nitpicking about here. But unless you must have the videos, you would be better off purchasing the 2002 Greatest Hits collection because of the cheaper price tag. Thankfully, I found this collection for $12 used, or else I would have bought Greatest Hits, too.
Free Music Review: Once I had a band, and they were a gas.
Hit: 4 Stars
Blondie have finally got the respect they truly deserve. Seeing them inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was pretty cool (they even had an onstage snit to prove they were still loaded with attitude), and this collection is just frosting on the beater.
On the plus side, you get three interesting "new" items. There's a previously unavailable mix of "Good Boys" (from "The Curse of Blondie" CD), a new mix of "In The Flesh" (which doesn't better the original) and an outrageous mash-up of The Doors Vs Blondie with "Rapture Riders" (and its accompanying video!). The interesting thing about the new "In The Flesh" is that you can imagine the new breed of Rock/pop goddesses like Gwen Stefani of Brittany Spears tackling it - and knowing they wouldn't have a peroxided molecule of the sass that Debbie Harry has.
Blondie was always about flash and glamour, which is what made their best albums ("Parallel Lines" and "Eat To The Beat") so charmingly eclectic and their best singles so earth shattering. They were the first "new-wave" band to score a number one with -- Fer crying out loud -- a disco song, and were the very first band to chart a hit rap song that mashed-up rap and pop. (It was nearly 6 years later that Run-DMC would share video space with the resurgent Aerosmith.) Even the lesser known singles are killer. "The Hardest Part" has got to be the fiercest Debbie Harry vocal, and the French/English version of "Denis" is a lost classic.
The DVD is a hoot. It is kind of striking to see these primitive MTV era bits from "Heart Of Glass" and "Rapture." It's worth it just to see the band in their young and hungry stages...hard to believe that the band that recorded the terrific "Maria" were in their 50s. All great archival material.
Minor quibble - single edits. But these were SMASH singles, and it just goes to show you that there is no shame in being a pop band, and there is also no reason a pop band can't have a major impact on popular culture. Thanks to this new CD/DVD set from Blondie, you can now join in with those who call the music of Debbie Harry and company a pleasure without using the word "guilty" as a preface. Although the 2002 "Greatest Hits" is probably a better CD for the casual listener, for us fans, this is absolutely worth the bucks.