Introduction

CAROL OF HARVEST (1978)
1) Put On Your Nightcap; 2) You And Me; 3) Somewhere At The End Of Our Rainbow; 4) Treary Eyes; 5) Try A Little Bit; 6*) River; 7*) Sweet Heroin; 8*) Brickstone.
The short-lived band Carol Of Harvest is frequently listed in catalogs under «Krautrock», which is really a complete mockery of the term — unless we really want to apply it to any band born and raised under the skies of Deutschland. Including The Scorpions, Accept, Rammstein, you name it. If, however, we choose to be reasonable and limit the term to a certain harsh style of avantgarde progressive rock with industrial overtones and a certain morose Teutonic attitude, then even under the most broad definition of the term Carol Of Harvest could never be proper Krautrock. Were we to choose just one band to serve as a role model for these guys, it would most likely be Renaissance — melancholic progressive folk with a fairly traditional approach to sonic beauty, including pretty acoustic guitars and lovely female vocals.
The band was largely the brainchild of guitarist and songwriter Axel Schmierer, who is credited for every composition on the album; however, the band's collective sound is just as crucially de­pending on the keyboard tones of cosmic wiz Jürgen Kolb, and, of course, the vocals of Beate Krause — not an exceptional singer, but a very nice one, caught somewhere in the middle be­tween Annie Haslam and Sandy Denny (and, fortunately, singing without much of an accent, be­cause German accents sound sexy on iron-clad femme fatales like Nico, but would be rather ridi­culous on sweet sorrowful ladies in gentle mourning). Although they all came together some­where around Munich, near the birthplace of Amon Düül II, there is really very little on the album that links them to the great Bavarian heroes of prog-rock: instead of blues and jazz, they choose folk as their point of departure, and their message is far less psychedelic and far more, shall we say, serious-tragedy-oriented.
Indeed, the songs written by Schmierer and performed by Krause serve a conceptual purpose, albeit not a highly original one — Carol Of Harvest is a lament for the loss of innocence, a collection of grievous ecological anthems that strike the same artistic blows at technological pro­gress with weeping as Kraftwerk did with irony. The album's subtitle, printed out in large letters and in intentionally not-too-correct English on the back cover, is: «A song of the good green grass, a song no more of the city streets, a song of the soil of the fields», and you have already noticed that the band's name agrees with this. So, the mood of the album is indeed quite akin to that of classic Renaissance, on such records as Ashes Are Burning or Turn Of The Cards, and since by 1978 Renaissance had already begun to evolve in a more overtly pop side, it is nice to see somebody else take their cues from them and give it one more try.
The album's magnum opus is the opening track, the 16-minute long suite ʽPut On Your Nightcapʼ, in which Krause informs us that we are standing "close to the edge", but definitely not in the opti­mistic-idealistic sense of Jon Anderson. Starting out as a dark acoustic ballad with swooshing winds in the background, the song then drifts into the realm of «astral» synth solos and howling guitar workouts, before picking up the pace and guiding us through a climactic finale. It is very easy to spot out all the influences — Renaissance, Sandy Denny, Ash Ra Tempel, Genesis, etc. — but despite the utter lack of originality or even virtuoso musicianship, the song sounds quite convincing to me, as it works on the basic senses in a far more straightforward manner than the majority of neo-prog imitators. Much of this has to do with a specific sense of taste: thus, Kolb's synthesizers are not imitating traditional keyboards, but are really evocating alien sounds (at a couple of points, he lets rip with an almost arcade-like soundtrack of enemy ships attacking the planet), which is a little unexpected on such a supposedly «down-to-earth» record, but somehow makes perfect sense — if, for instance, you think of the synthesizers as symbols of the technolo­gical plague brought upon the planet, and of Schmierer's wailing guitar solos as symbolic of Mother Earth's aching reaction to this horror.
The shorter tracks are almost completely acoustic: ʽYou And Meʼ and ʽTreary Eyesʼ (sic!) are two straightforward laments that could just as well have been played and sung by Joan Baez, and ʽSomewhere At The End Of Our Rainbowʼ starts out in the same manner, before getting augmen­ted by the mighty Mellotron and more tasty guitar bits (this song, in particular, is quite Floydian in its approach to guitar and keyboard tone, clearly influenced by ʽShine On You Crazy Dia­mondʼ above everything else). Meanwhile, ʽTry A Little Bitʼ, whose first few notes will make you think, for about a second and a half, that they have decided to cover ʽStairway To Heavenʼ, goes for a slightly more invocative agenda, moving forward at a faster tempo than everything else and generally expecting us to resort to action rather than just stand moping around as them fields are getting shorn of the good green grass. More of those astral synths mixed in with Haslam-like wordless vocalizing — cool effect.
Naturally, this is not a forgotten masterpiece of prog-folk, as people who like to sound cool as they single-handedly rewrite musical history would have you believe. But neither is it just a gene­ric failure to make something interesting in that genre: behind all the lack of originality lies a good collective Bavarian heart, and there is really not a single band that they directly emulate. For one thing, Renaissance never rocked that hard — their guitar and keyboard players combined the language of classical music, folk, and soft rock, with nothing like the astral keyboard solos of Kolb and the distorted howls of Schmierer's guitar. Floyd, on the other hand, did not have a girl singer, and were never so deeply immersed in the folk tradition. So it's a little bit of this and a large bite of that and a modest chunk of something else, and in the end, it is one of the saddest, yet most accessible records of the year 1978.
The CD reissue of the album throws on three more tracks that were recorded live and actually sound very intriguing, disclosing additional layers of depth that were not at all evident on the album: the short instrumental ʽRiverʼ, riding a mammoth chugging bassline and dominated by Eastern- and avantgarde-influenced organ and synth jamming, sounds far closer to the space-rock jamming of Hawkwind than anything else — and after that, it segues into the brooding, ominous ʽSweet Heroinʼ, which is as close to Goth rock as these guys ever got (and, apart from Krause's vocals, is really reminiscent of Amon Düül II). Unfortunately, the recordings have awful sound quality — most probably taken from audience tapes, since the sound of people chatting over their food or something is often louder than the sound of the music — and it is all over before you can actually get a good understanding of what a typical Carol Of Harvest live show was all about.
Too bad, because the band folded soon after this self-titled debut predictably flopped, and was never heard of again. (I think Beate Krause re-emerges once or twice in the Eighties, singing with some local German jazz combos). With one exception: apparently, in 2009 there was an album called Ty I Ja (ʽYou And Iʼ) released under the name of Carol Of Harvest, with Axel Schmierer as the only original band member, plus a bunch of unknowns, and featuring 15 relatively short songs with Polish titles. Detailed information on this odd surprise is quite hard to find even on the Internet, and I am not in the mood for detective stories here, so let us just leave it at that and remember the true Carol Of Harvest as a brave, short-lived one-album band that deserves its own footnote in prog-rock history; and its own thumbs up, of course.

THE CARS



THE CARS (1978)
1) Good Times Roll; 2) My Best Friend's Girl; 3) Just What I Needed; 4) I'm In Touch With Your World; 5) Don't Cha Stop; 6) You're All I've Got Tonight; 7) Bye Bye Love; 8) Moving In Stereo; 9) All Mixed Up.
The fate of this album is decided in two seconds flat. Two seconds! One — and you have yourself a dry, distorted guitar tone playing a classic old school blues-rock lick that would sound perfectly at home on a T. Rex or a Stones record (in fact, it's pretty much the same chord sequence that Keith Richards plays in ʽStop Breaking Downʼ). Two — and you watch as it contrasts with a robo­tic synth tone and a wobbly astral pulse that seems to come directly from a Kraftwerk tune. And there you have it: a simple, immediately effective, and amazingly symbolic synthesis of traditional rock'n'roll with an entirely new type of music. For all of New Wave's diversity, did any artist ever succeed in getting his point across in a matter of two seconds?
Not that the charm of ʽGood Times Rollʼ does not expand to the rest of the song. The melody keeps developing, but always with this strict preservation of a democratic balance between the «old» (as represented by the rhythm and lead guitar work of Ric Ocasek and Elliot Easton, res­pectively) and the «new» (as represented by Greg Hawkes' smoothly, but mechanically flowing rivulets of synth phrasing). And then there's the lyrics — the song title takes up a well-worn R&B / rock'n'roll cliché and sends it up in an ironically modernist way: we all remember Ray Charles telling us to "let the good times roll", but we could hardly imagine him adding "let them knock you around", much less "let them make you a clown". That's The Cars for you — vapor-headed and optimistic on the surface, bittersweet and acid-tongued half an inch under the surface.
You can rarely, very rarely understand what sort of emotional reaction these songs are supposed to extract — mixed reaction, for sure, but one thing that was there from the very beginning is a certain sense of fatalism, acceptance of life as it is, together with the fact that, no matter what you do, you will commit stupid and dangerous things, and you might just as well relax and enjoy them before they inevitably drag you to your doom and stuff. The entire album is drenched in that attitude, a mix of hedonism and apocalypticism that The Cars obviously inherited from one of their biggest idols, Roxy Music (together with the penchant for brutally sexy + intentionally tasteless album covers) — except they're nowhere near as «artsy» as Roxy Music, with the melo­dies more simple and straightforward and the vocals not even beginning to approach the exagge­rated mannerisms of Bryan Ferry.
They're really quite simple lads with no puffed-up ambitions — if that much is not yet made ob­vious by ʽGood Times Rollʼ, then ʽMy Best Friend's Girlʼ, an unconcealed tribute to the song­writing style of Buddy Holly, clinches the case. If not for the robotic synths popping in every now and then, and if not for odd references to "nuclear boots" and "drip dry gloves", nothing would indicate that the song could not have been written in 1958, and when the chorus is fol­lowed up by that little Carl Perkins / Buddy Holly / George Harrison rockabilly line, it's like the twenty years in between 1958 and 1978 never happened. Yet, when you think about it real hard, Ocasek's vocals are very much 1978, with that subtle melange of idiocy, paranoia, and irony — and the contrast between the exaggerated happiness of the melody and the overall tragic message is starkly modern. Like, there's nothing about the song, really, that suggests tragedy except for the surprising resolution of the chorus (Ric's "...but she used to be mine!" comes across almost as if he were too embarrassed to admit it before a judgmental world), and yet it's all about the same kind of resigned fatalism as we just had in ʽGood Times Rollʼ.
Once the formula has been established, The Cars do not see any reasons to depart from it, but the album remains melodically diverse enough to not let us mind it in the least. For ʽJust What I Neededʼ, which they probably selected as the lead single because its thick-robust riffs were as close to commercially viable Boston-style arena-rock as this album ever gets, bass player Ben Orr is selected as vocalist, and he is indeed a better choice for carrying a muscular song like that, but the mood and message remain the same — where Boston would sing "I guess you're just what I needed" with the presupposition of «it's such a miracle that I got just what I needed», The Cars sing it with the presupposition of «well, uh, it's kind of lucky that I probably got just what I needed, but, you know, if I didn't, it wouldn't be much of a problem, really, because, like, you can't always get what you want and stuff». It should be ascribed to a certain level of musical genius that they manage to sound terminally bored and exciting / energetic at the same time.
As the record goes by, our interest is further kept up by means of quirky sonic experimentation (ʽI'm In Touch With Your Worldʼ, crammed with as many fun sound bites as these guys could get from their month in the studio), occasionally increased tempos (ʽDon't Cha Stopʼ, a sex song that neatly separates the rest of the record into two equal parts — pre-copulation frustration and post-copulation depression), and, finally, what should be the album's best song once you get fed up with the big hits on all the A-sides: ʽMoving In Stereoʼ, whose cold synths, doom-laden bassline, and lengthy instrumental coda make it straightforwardly grim, unmasked by uptempo rhythmics or merry singalong vocal choruses. It also contains a great, often overlooked verse, that I believe is essential to understand The Cars and their understated awesomeness: "It's so easy to blow up your problems / It's so easy to play up your breakdown / It's so easy to fly through a window / It's so easy to fool with the sound" — precisely the kind of things that so many bad artists exploit in their music, and precisely the kind of things that The Cars preferred to avoid even when they were being at their most psychological. ʽMoving In Stereoʼ is no exception — it's a fairly depres­sing tune, yet it achieves that effect without resorting to any of the usual clichés associated with depression (well, except for maybe that booming bass, but you'd never accuse the song of having a stereotypical «Goth» sound anyway, with or without the bass).
Such a simple-sounding record, on the whole, and yet so perfect in its intelligent humbleness that no «simple pop-rock» album from the era, with or without New Wave trimmings, can truly com­pete with it: everything else is either too obsessed with musical innovation and serious message (which is not at all a bad thing, but leaves the niche of pure intelligent entertainment uncomfor­tably empty), or too drowned in primitive emotions and genrist clichés, or is simply less interes­ting from a musical standpoint (like Tom Petty, for instance). An obvious thumbs up, the worst thing about which is that the band's subsequent career could not hope to live up to the debut — having pretty much said it all in all the ways they knew across these nine tracks, Ocasec, Orr, and company would never again conquer another peak of comparable height.

CANDY-O (1979)
1) Let's Go; 2) Since I Held You; 3) It's All I Can Do; 4) Double Life; 5) Shoo Be Doo; 6) Candy-O; 7) Night Spots; 8) You Can't Hold On Too Long; 9) Lust For Kicks; 10) Got A Lot On My Head; 11) Dangerous Type.
The «carbon copy» principle does not necessarily lead to failure — one need only mention the classic example of Strange Days doing everything that The Doors did and more — but with The Cars, we have a classic example of the opposite: Candy-O is just like The Cars, featuring all the same ingredients, but completely missing the magic of its predecessor. It's such a direct slap in the face, and, strange as it is, so many people have noticed this and commented on it that a de­tailed, professional-musicological comparison of the two records could probably lead to major scientific breakthroughs on our perception of music in general, and I'm dead serious.
As an incentive, just take the case of the opening tracks. ʽLet's Goʼ is a good pop-rock single that also opens with the juxtaposition of old-school rock guitar and new-school futuristic synthesizer, also has a catchy singalong chorus, and also has some of that detached, ironic cool. It's a nice song to brighten up your day — but it just ain't ʽGood Times Rollʼ, because ʽGood Times Rollʼ had a certain amount of sonic depth to it. The guitar lick was snapping and barking, the synth counter-response went kick-ass, kick-ass, the vocal was bitterly desperate, the post-chorus key­board flourish was an anthemic fanfare. There, you had a feeling like something was really hap­pening. ʽLet's Goʼ, in comparison, is just a bit of light-headed fluff — there's no double bottom to this song, no intrinsic bite to the guitar or keyboard melodies, and even the lyrics, come to think of it, are just a 1979 take on ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ ("and she won't give up 'cause she's seventeen" is, after all, a dead giveaway).
Alas, the same relative disappointment applies to just about any song on the album — every­where you go, you are greeted with the same simple, endearing, fluffy synth-adorned power-pop, decently composed, arranged, and performed, but with very little lasting value, and very little, in fact, to distinguish it from any similar New Wave pop from the era. Some of the choruses are fabulously catchy, yes, mainly through being so repetitive (ʽIt's All I Can Doʼ), but it is only on the guitar-heavy title track, with Orr's almost Kraftwerkian robotic vocals, the relentless mecha­nistic punch of the rhythm guitar, and the weird alternation of power chords and pseudo-classical arpeggios in the guitar solo, where I am reminded that this is indeed the same band that made The Cars into one of the epoch's most symbolic albums.
I wish I could say that the main problem of Candy-O is that it focuses too much on «silly love songs», but so did The Cars — it's not as if these songs are really that much «sillier» by defini­tion. In fact, repeated listens bring out favorable points almost everywhere. ʽNight Spotsʼ has a classy guitar riff, and it's fun to see it clash with Hawkes' keyboards as they occasionally imitate the sound of equipment heating up and ready to explode. The "it's all gonna happen to you" cho­rus of ʽDouble Lifeʼ is elegantly attenuated by Easton's slide guitar licks, giving it a touch of class. ʽGot A Lot On My Headʼ is frantic fun, opening with a power-pop riff that lesser bands would kill for, and you just gotta love how it explodes right before the beginning of the verse, scintilla­ting in little flaming fragments away in the stratosphere. In fact, not a single song even begins to approach «bad» — I am not exactly sure about the function of the brief echoey experiment of ʽShoo Be Dooʼ, which sounds like a psycho-New Wave impersonation of Gene Vincent, but at least it's a curious experiment, regardless of whether it succeeds or not.
Overall, it's just like this: imagine an album like Rubber Soul immediately followed, rather than preceded, by a... Please Please Me, then imagine your reaction at such a twist. In time, you'd probably learn to fall under the charm of both, but the first feeling of disappointment (especially if this had really happened around 1965-66 and you were there at the time) would pro­bably stay with you for the rest of your life. And this is pretty much what happened here — Candy-O has the same pretty face as The Cars, but there's no teeth in that pretty mouth once it begins to smile at you. Perfectly enjoyable, but I never ever even get the urge to sing along to any of these songs because I don't feel like they have enough soul in them, and it's hard to empathize. Maybe it would have been better to have them all as instrumentals? Anyway, still a thumbs up for all the cool melodies, but a major relative disappointment that certainly does not deserve getting a Roxy Music-inspired album cover — where's the appropriate decadence, goddammit?
PANORAMA (1980)
1) Panorama'>Panorama; 2) Touch And Go; 3) Gimme Some Slack; 4) Don't Tell Me No; 5) Getting Through; 6) Misfit Kid; 7) Down Boys; 8) You Wear Those Eyes; 9) Running To You; 10) Up And Down.
Perhaps Ocasek and Orr, too, had a suspicion that the magic did not work as efficiently with Candy-O as it did with The Cars — that the album gave too much of an impression that they were trying consciously and somewhat artificially to recreate what used to come so naturally and effortlessly. Either that, that is, or someone in the record business just slapped them around and said, «So you think you're some hot New Wave stuff? I'll tell you who's really New Wave — Gary Numan is! He's not even using any guitars now, that stuff's so on its way out!» And thus, as the Eighties rolled in, it was decided that the sound had to modernize.
Do not be misled, however, by the frequent descriptions of Panorama as a dark, experimental, less accessible album than the usual Carfare — sure it is somewhat darker, mainly because it relies more on bass-happy keyboards than colorful power-pop guitars, but there's nothing parti­cularly «experimental» about it compared to the general post-punk boom of 1980, and as for less accessible, well, The Cars were always oriented at the pop market, and even at their most deviant they had to look for instrumental earworms and catchy singalong choruses. And they were never a bunch of shiny happy people anyway — feeling miserable, if not on the surface, then deep down in the core at least, was always an obligatory component of even their biggest hits.
Anyway, I do not support the school of thought according to which, in basic quality terms, The Cars took a huge dip down with Panorama, and later had to go through a period of convales­cence and atonement with the more traditional Shake It Up. At least in the overall context of their career, Panorama introduces some fresh change — and, for what it's worth, the general quantity and quality of the hooks is hardly below the same parameters for Candy-O. I can certainly live with the relative lack of guitar (relative — it is still an integral part of the sound, and most of the solos are guitar-based), and I can understand the sometimes questionable stretch­ing out of song lengths: the band is getting a little bit artsier, and that means requiring a little more time for the build-up or for the groove to achieve the proper hypnotizing effect.
For some reason, I used to really dislike the title track — probably because the nearly six-minute length got to me in the wrong way, but I eventually grew accustomed to its paranoid groove, not to mention that, finally, we have a proper album opener for a band named The Cars, as its tempo and atmosphere are so perfectly compatible with a nighttime drive on a lonely highway. At the heart of what begins as a sort of proto-Depeche Mode synth-pop runner really lies a desperately frantic classic rocker, and it's worth waiting for the climactic moment at about 3:55 into the song when Easton finally breaks through with a crazy-aggressive rock solo, unfortunately, spliced into several small bits rather than allowing the guitarist to stretch out and spill it all in one mega-burst. It is their only attempt at properly doing that «bitter-fast post-punk wail song» that everybody else was doing at the time, and there's enough atmospheric tension and individual guitar / synth hooks here to stand the competition.
The three singles from the album weren't too bad, either: ʽTouch And Goʼ is melodically astute, going from a tricky polymeter structure in the verse (that creates quite a confusing feel) to a «relieving», bouncy ska-like chorus resolution; ʽDon't Tell Me Noʼ is the album's most robotic number, with a dark (generic, though) arena-rock riff and a mechanically soulless keyboard part that agree perfectly with Orr's half-human, half-machine vocals dropping lyrical lines that eerily resemble a modern chatbot ("It's my party. You can come. Don't tell me no"); and only ʽGimme Some Slackʼ seems somewhat silly in comparison, probably because the chorus is based on a really dumb-sounding hook (bad synth tone, too), but it's still catchy.
The non-singles, largely stuck on the second side, range from ironically catchy declarations of insecurity (ʽMisfit Kidʼ) to pissed-off rockers with increased guitar presence (ʽDown Boysʼ may have Easton's angriest guitar riff ever on a Cars song) to slow, smoky ballads stuck somewhere between old-school psychedelia and new-school adult contemporary (ʽYou Wear Those Eyesʼ: not a great song, but that's one great wobbly guitar tone Easton is using for the lead parts). Not everything is equally memorable, but, really, not a single song is openly bad — the craft and light experimentation that went into every one of them seems obvious to me.
It's not as if I were heavily recommending Panorama over Candy-O, even if my tone for the previous review may seem distinctly bluer than for this one. In Spartan terms of melody and hooks, the two are quite on the same level — the only difference is that here, they are trying to construct a different atmosphere, in which they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, but at least it provides a feeling of artistic growth, and that's good enough for me. It wasn't good enough for the public, who weren't amused and pretty much humiliated ʽTouch And Goʼ in the charts (none of that depressed shit for the US of A in the happy summer of 1980 — not at a time when we have Olivia Newton-John singing ʽMagicʼ, at least!). But it's good enough for me to confirm another thumbs up and insist that, even if one hates it, one has at least to admit that Panorama proved that The Cars were not merely a well-oiled, perfectly programmed, finalized, and locked hit-writing machine operating on one single algorithm.