Necessary Evil Reviews

Deborah Harry is my absolute favorite icon ever. Regardless of gender, for me, she’s the coolest, hippest and greatest person to ever step up to a microphone and make music. I’ve always been intrigued by her combination of supermodel pretty looks and patent refusal to be anything close to safe or innocent. With Blondie, she’s always been an avant-garde ironist making perfect hybrid pop singles. Her solo career is an entirely different matter. While she’s always been experimental, without the reign of Chris Stein, Clem Burke and Jimmy Destri behind her she’s too wild and weird. While I’m normally down with it, there’s a limit. Necessary Evil is no different.

“Two Times Blue,” the first single and album opener, is a gorgeous little dance-pop song, “School for Scandal” is a fun punk-dance song and “If I Had You” is a pretty little ballad. These are the first three songs on the album, so everything seems to be going fine until you hit “Live With Vengeance” a song that sounds ultimately like a rejected James Bond theme and a generically produced hip-hop inspired dance-pop song. It’s awful. This song is just a symptom of the overriding issue with the entire album: it’s too generically produced, too insistent on hip-hop lite beats and posturing, too long and indulgent. If more songs had been like the trashy Strokes-ish “You’re Too Hot” and “Two Times Blue” this would have been a much better release. As it stands it’s not awful, but it’s nothing spectacular either. So, while she’s made solid, and numerous classic, albums with Blondie, Harry has yet to make a consistent solo album. DOWNLOAD: “Two Times Blue,” “White Out,” “You’re Too Hot”