The Blasters – Hard Line

One more Blasters album. Even though this came out in 1985, I don’t ever remember running across it until last year, when I picked it up locally at Shady Dog records. Honestly haven’t given this a lot of listens since then. I put it on for this project and . . . meh. There’s some hints of what Dave Alvin would do better at a later date. There’s “Little Honey” — but there’s a better version of that (sung by John Doe of X) on the “Border Radio” soundtrack, which we’ll get to. And, finally on the last song of the album, there’s what we would recognize as a Blasters song. Any of the others would have been fine, deftly placed into their normal rollicking songs, but an album full of them just doesn’t sound interesting, and some of it is downright middle of the road.

I’m all for bands getting out of their comfort zone, but this reads like the Blasters trying to put out something radio friendly, and it just doesn’t work for me.