Customer Ratings & Reviews

I lost a lot of cd's this was at a good price I bought it and was glad I did.

I love the music from the 80's and Blondie is one of my favorites!

If you are a Blondie fan, this is a must have buy.

Okay, seriously, what the heck happened to Blondie? I'd heard the band hasn't sounded like it did in the '80s and '90s in quite some time, but what the heck is this garbage? For starters, you have several perfectly good greatest hits collections out on the market, so why re-record a bunch of your biggest hits with sub-par vocals that are buried in the instruments to hide the fact that they don't sound like they used to (with the exception, of course, for "Maria," which was not re-recorded). At best, I would give the Greatest Hits Deluxe Redux four stars; on the whole, the songs are there, but the vocals just aren't where I think they should be for a former powerhouse band like Blondie. That brings me to Ghosts of Download. What on Earth is this pile of trash? I realize Blondie aren't the first post-punk/new wave band to dabble in other genres (in fact, Blondie have been rather experimental over the course of their career), but this thirteen-track pile of refuse borders on a lackluster dancehall album more than anything else. It reminds me a little bit of Billy Idol's most recent record, Kings & Queens of the Underground, that blended dance music with '80s punk rock, but it doesn't do nearly as good a job of blending those two disparate genres into something actually worth listening to. Instead, I could listen to barely more than half of each of the songs on Ghosts of Download before shutting it off in disgust, earning a solid one star (since I can't give it zero). This brings me to another issue: what happened to all of Blondie's other albums? The digital market used to be saturated in Blondie releases, and now all we have are a handful of actual albums and a bunch of singles and EPs. And none of the previous (and far superior) greatest hits compilations are available aside from Atomic/Atomix: The Very Best of Blondie. Did Debbie & Co. lose the digital rights to their own music? I mean, they're pretty much all still available on CD and vinyl, so why not digital? In short, don't buy this album. Save up your hard-earned dollars and get yourself a copy of the 2002 Greatest Hits album on CD. The recordings are FAR superior to the re-recorded versions found on this album, and you won't have to suffer therough the abomination that is Ghosts of Download. Then we can lament Blondie as we knew her and loved her together.