Prepare a hallowed place in the audio lounge to make room for the bountiful official box set Blondie: Against the Odds 1974-1982, a labor of love and restoration enshrining the enduring sassy panache, dance-y rhythms, and silver-tinsel sheen of America’s premier New Wave band. This pirate chest of music and memorabilia contains remastered albums, alternative takes, rehearsal tapes, a previously unreleased cover version of The Doors’ “Moonlight Drive” (which turns Jim Morrison’s croony nocturne into a jaunty excursion), track by track commentary, an extensive discography, and photographs galore. (For the extravagant-minded, there’s a Super Deluxe Red Vinyl Box Set edition that should come with its own security guard.) How welcome and overdue this tribute package is. Emerging from the rumbling bowels of CBGB’s on New York’s Bowery, Blondie would go on to snare and retain a mainstream audience denied most of their fellow grads on the punk scene. Onstage, Blondie made a compelling ruckus but it was in the production studio that their sound was honed and streamlined and baited with irresistible hooks. Each catchy song shot like a silver arrow across the radio waves. “Heart of Glass,” “Rapture,” “One Way or Another,” “The Tide is High,” on and on. It’s impossible to imagine the opening of American Gigolo without “Call Me” unfurling on the soundtrack like a magic carpet ride. It may be safely argued that Blondie was the only band to emerge from the downtown scene that radiated glamour—in the person and presence of the incandescent siren at the mic, Deborah Harry. With her sugar-spun Marilyn Monroe hair, red Corvette lipstick, and porcelain complexion, Harry looked like an Andy Warhol silkscreen come to life and has only become more iconographic with time. Not just a chatty chanteuse with outbursts of ardor, Harry reclaims her status on Against the Odds as power pop’s top screwball comedienne in numbers such as “Rip Her to Shreds” and “Giant Ants from Space” (a sci-fi disaster movie performed as a bouncy rumba). This is that rare time capsule that echoes with laughter. —James Wolcott