Introduction

SHAKE IT UP (1981)
1) Since You're Gone; 2) Shake It Up; 3) I'm Not The One; 4) Victim Of Love; 5) Cruiser; 6) A Dream Away; 7) This Could Be Love; 8) Think It Over; 9) Maybe Baby.
Back to basics — after the somewhat exaggerated gloominess of Panorama, The Cars return with arguably their most lightweight and unpretentious release to that point. If The Cars were all about a smooth, symbolic transition from the age of «classic rock» into the modern era, Candy-O was all about how to handle girl problems in that modern era, and Panorama was about finding a good balance between hooks and atmosphere, then Shake It Up is just a collection of pop hooks, period. The album has almost no personality whatsoever, as Ocasek and Orr either deliver the lyrics without any particular vocal expression or, for some reason, borrow elements of alien vocal styles (on ʽSince You're Goneʼ, Ocasek seems to be giving us a Dylan impersonation — with all that rising pitch on the shouted parts), not to mention how the vocals are regularly obscured in the mix, starting a tendency that would eventually reach its peak on Heartbeat City.
With albums like these, writing reviews is no fun because it all ultimately comes down to the overall number of hooks per song — these tunes are catchy all right, but so slight that it's easier to come up with useful insights about a jar of mayonnaise. The title track, which was also chosen for the album's first single, truly does nothing except incite you to "shake it up" (or, if you need more detail, "dance all night, play all day, don't let nothin' get in the way"), with a fun guitar melody and an appropriate set of woo-hoos to carry the day; its B-side, ʽCruiserʼ, is much better, parti­cularly its odd two-part riff that begins with brawny arena-rock power chords and ends with a lighter bluesy flourish (people usually prefer the reverse order), but there's little else to the song: it does somehow manage to convey the grimy atmosphere of nighttime cruising through the seedy parts of the big city, but that is hardly enough for a great song — decent, nothing more.
As far as sonic evolution is concerned, Shake It Up clearly pushes forward into the electronic age, although in 1981 mainstream production standards had not yet propelled bands high up in the air: electronically enhanced drums, with elements of drum machine programming, and syn­thesized dance-pop loops reflect the possible influence of Prince (something like ʽThink It Overʼ could, in fact, very easily have fit in on Controversy), but the sound is still very much «in your face», with a high quotient of pure fun. On the other hand, it does hurt with the occasional ballad like ʽI'm Not The Oneʼ, where Easton's melodic lead guitar lines are almost wasted on a bleepy melody that seems more suitable for a soundtrack to some early Japanese hentai game than for your respectable speakers — meaning that the then-fresh, now-ridiculous sonic textures of the decade are already beginning to corrode the musicianship.
In the middle of it all comes ʽA Dream Awayʼ, a tune that is seriously out of place on the album: a grim, slightly industrialized soundscape, with Ocasek's voice run through some serious effects and now somewhat similar to Lou Reed's in its gloomy commentary on a world that cannot satisfy the protagonist, because "the good life is just a dream away". The song is almost like an outtake from Panorama, and although thematically it is not too far away from the many other pessimistic statements on this record, musically it is far darker than the title track or ʽVictim Of Loveʼ ­— showing that, once the initial impression is over, there's at least a little more to the album than just the hook-stuffed singles.
But still, not enough to shake off the feeling that Shake It Up is about as lightweight a record as its cover suggests — as The Cars return to the old tried-and-true practice of putting glitzy super­models on their slightly decadent album sleeves (and this time armed with a cocktail shaker at that). A nice listen if you like simple and direct early Eighties pop, and a well-earned thumbs up all the way, but the fact that the title track actually earned them their first Top 10 hit on the Billboard charts (ʽGood Times Rollʼ only hit No. 41, in comparison) is hardly a positive testimony in the face of humanity.
HEARTBEAT CITY (1984)
1) Hello Again; 2) Looking For Love; 3) Magic; 4) Drive; 5) Stranger Eyes; 6) You Might Think; 7) It's Not The Night; 8) Why Can't I Have You; 9) I Refuse; 10) Heartbeat City.
I must say, it still feels good to be so completely free of Eighties nostalgia that it is possible to openly state — Heartbeat City sucks from start to finish, despite being such an immaculately crafted product. I can enjoy some of the individual songs, and I can sometimes find things of deeper value behind the superficial pop gloss, but on a general, simplified scale Heartbeat City is a musical disaster. All of the Cars' records have «dated» to a certain extent, but none of them more so than this collection of bright, shiny mid-Eighties pop nuggets, fashioned so exclusively for the sake of commercial success and nothing else.
The band took a lengthy break after Shake It Up, during which Ocasek and Hawkes released their first solo albums and also had themselves plenty of free time to take a good look at the world's trending directions. Two trends that seemed obvious were: (a) «guitar bands are on their way out» with synth-pop and digital technology on the rise; (b) MTV power. Consequently, once they finally got together for the next effort in mid-1983, enlisting Robert "Mutt" Lange to pro­duce the album (you can't go wrong with a producer who was able to cover even AC/DC and Def Leppard in gold!) and relocating to London for the sessions (European flavor!), the two most important things were — get rid of most of the guitars in favor of synthesizers and electronic drums; and produce as many videos as possible, most of which, it has to be admitted, were far more innovative and fun than the songs they were supposed to accompany.
Oh sure, Heartbeat City has plenty of hooks — cold, mechanical, robotic ones; not cold enough to be Kraftwerk-icy and haunting, though, but simply cold enough to feel as plastic and lifeless as the opening ghostly vocals that greet you with their "hello... hello again". The entire track is a mix of several different, but equally simplistic synth parts (the main eight-note synth riff sounds like two robots vomiting in sync), toughened up with power metal guitar chords in the chorus, and no amount of tragedy in Ocasek's voice can salvage the garbage melody (which is garbage not because it is synth-pop, but because it is bad synth-pop: where Depeche Mode could tune their electronics to convey sadness, disillusionment, or even horror, ʽHello Againʼ and its ilk just sound like repetitive beeps and bleeps).
Uptempo pop songs like ʽLooking For Loveʼ and ʽYou Might Thinkʼ simply sound awful, and I would never accept arguments like «well, The Cars sounded like everybody sounded back in 1978, and now they just sound like everybody sounded in 1984 — what's the big deal?», because not everybody sounded like this in 1984, but only everybody obsessed with capitalizing on the latest trends, and the latest trends were «more synthesizers, less intelligence»: ʽYou Might Thinkʼ rides almost entirely on one five-note keyboard sequence (once you've heard the first two seconds of the song, believe me, you've heard pretty much everything), and relates to ʽGood Times Rollʼ in about the same way in which a Britney Spears «pop» song would relate to a Beatles one. Why the heck did it chart? Simple — because of the video, which was one of the first videos to use computer graphics, and combined computer effects with sleaziness to perfection. And don't even get me started on ʽMagicʼ, with its three-chord power riff and arena-rock chorus that sounds like very bad Boston. Was it really that hard to invest just a little more time and energy in such a thing as composing?
Ultimately, I count two out of ten songs that still have a magic touch to them after all these years. I should be hating ʽDriveʼ as a synth-heavy adult contemporary ballad, deeply derivative from 10cc's ʽI'm Not In Loveʼ; truth is, I have always been enchanted by Orr's vocal part — and the synth textures and ethereal overdubbed harmonies agree with it very well. Unlike most of every­thing else here, this track actually has soul, and plenty of psychologism: somehow, it just captures that «late night depression» vibe to perfection, and if you're ever in need of a little seance of self-pity, locked all alone in your room and stuff, ʽDriveʼ should be among the first tracks on that mixtape. Alas, Orr never replicates that success — already on his second ballad, ʽWhy Can't I Have Youʼ, he sounds plastic, manneristic, and theatrical in comparison.
The only other track that redeems the record is ʽHeartbeat Cityʼ itself (a.k.a. ʽJackiʼ on the ori­ginal US edition of the album). Uptempo and electronic like everything else, it is actually a deep­ly melancholic ballad that takes the «fun side» of the album and turns it on its head — the lyrics are somewhat enigmatic (nobody really knows who Jacki actually is, and why is it that every­thing depends on her presence or absence), but the feeling is quite unambiguous: one of being trapped, without hope of escape or change, in «Heartbeat City». You can just think of it as a song of lost love, or, like I like to do, you can expand it to include a bit of that old Roxy Music-influenced melancholic decadence — looking for true feeling and passion in a hedonistic-materialistic world ("there's a place for everyone under Heartbeat City's golden sun", etc.). In any case, this is the only track on the entire record where the looped synth pattern actually conveys emotion and per­fectly agrees with Ocasek's sorrowful vocal part.
It would be useless to give the album a thumbs down — it has pretty much passed on to legend, and it will take yet another wave of general disgust (this time, retrospective, which is much harder) for generic Eighties production and commercialism to give it a proper spanking, which a single negative rating could hardly hope to trigger. More importantly, I find it hard to condemn an album which still contains occasional flashes of inspiration and even genius: ʽDriveʼ and ʽHeartbeat Cityʼ are unimpeachable, and show that The Cars certainly did not «run out of talent» by 1983 — they just let themselves be sidetracked with the temptation of getting back on that elusive cutting edge. But «great album»? Come on now, it's a frickin' sellout — look the word up in encyclopaedias, and eventually you'll find a certain Peter Phillips art piece illustrating it.
DOOR TO DOOR (1987)
1) Leave Or Stay; 2) You Are The Girl; 3) Double Trouble; 4) Fine Line; 5) Everything You Say; 6) Ta Ta Wayo Wayo; 7) Strap Me In; 8) Coming Up You; 9) Wound Up On You; 10) Go Away; 11) Door To Door.
Conventional wisdom says that Heartbeat City, with its mega-popular singles and ground-breaking videos, was a very good record — then the same conventional wisdom goes on to say that Door To Door, released after yet another break for solo projects, was a tremendous drop down in quality, and the record is consistently rated as the band's worst ever. So poorly produced, so uninspired, so boring, that the only way they could excuse themselves was by breaking up, which they did. One and a half stars, tops.
For some reason, I have never felt this opposition. To me, this is basically Heartbeat City Vol. 2, perhaps a wee bit heavier on (bad) guitars, but also a tad darker and more mysterious — on my own, I would never have guessed that I was supposed to love the former and hate the latter. It even has about the same ration of songs I really have a feeling for and songs I couldn't care less about never hearing again; my only explanation is that the overall «style» of Heartbeat City, which felt fresh and exciting in 1984, had become so clichéd and stale by 1987 that the same songs that used to be adored were now abhorred. But as time becomes compressed and we now look back at both records from a faraway point, I suppose it's high time the oddly polarized reac­tions began to be corrected.
I mean, ʽYou Are The Girlʼ is essentially a follow-up to ʽYou Might Thinkʼ, maybe a bit more sentimental, but essentally the same type of simple upbeat catchy pop song that does not mean much in the grand scheme of things, but is worth a chuckle or two while it's on. Granted, the second single, ʽStrap Me Inʼ, may be one of the worst things they ever did (three power chords is not the reason why they brought back more guitars, right?), but the third one, ʽComing Up Youʼ, is a soft synth pop tune for kids that has plenty of inventive «symphonic-electronic» overdubs to suggest they actually still cared at the moment, so?..
Anyway, the two songs I really like have nothing to do with the singles. ʽFine Lineʼ is a moody follow-up to ʽDriveʼ, this time with a smoky, melancholic atmosphere created by solemn sus­tained organ notes, and even moodier overdubs by Hawkes and Easton — this time there's no op­timism, as in ʽDriveʼ, and although the lyrics are enigmatic, the feeling is one of acknowledging the inevitability of alienation ("there's a fine line between us, all the way"), and it's working. The second favorite is ʽGo Awayʼ, another Orr-sung number that's actually closer to ʽDriveʼ in spi­rit, but now it's fast and energetic, and the escapist chorus, highlighted by a bitter-tender jangling guitar line, really stands out as an emotional outbreak. Both songs are dark in essence — uneasy broodings by people who feel trapped in a rut and do not have a good idea of how to break the circle, but are able to at least encode that desperation in melody.
Perhaps it was, after all, the element of thick distorted «quasi-punk» guitar that pissed off critics and fans alike: the title track begins with such an insanely fast drum beat that if it weren't the last track on the album, fans might have suspected their favorite band to have gone hardcore on their asses. But it's only there on three tracks — title song, ʽStrap Me Inʼ, and ʽDouble Troubleʼ, the last of which is actually moderately catchy, so not that much of a problem. There's also one of the earliest songs they wrote, ʽTa Ta Wayo Wayoʼ, another fast and merry pop-rocker that they re­hearsed in the studio and eventually loved so much they decided to finally cut it — silly decision, perhaps, yet there's nothing that should make us think of, say, ʽWhy Can't I Have Youʼ as a masterpiece and this song as a comparative throwaway.
In short, Door To Door isn't half as bad as they tell you: chances are that if you honestly like Heartbeat City, you'll find plenty of things to like on this belated follow-up as well. It's a dif­ferent matter entirely that The Cars, as a band, found themselves ultimately dissatisfied with each other and chose to break up — not at the end of their rope (Ocasek went on to have quite a suc­cessful career), but rather just because they felt like it: "we left on a good note, a high note", says Ocasek, and while the note could certainly have been higher, there was plenty of room in musi­cal Hell well below Heartbeat City (becoming a collective Bryan Adams, for instance!), and they never went there, and that's okay by me.
MOVE LIKE THIS (2011)
1) Blue Tip; 2) Too Late; 3) Keep On Knocking; 4) Soon; 5) Sad Song; 6) Free; 7) Drag On Forever; 8) Take Another Look; 9) It's Only; 10) Hits Me.
In the 1990s, Ocasek stated in interviews that The Cars would never ever run again, but, of course, that was just an artistic lie: all it took was the death of Ben Orr from cancer in 2000, and then a ridiculous experiment with Hawkes and Easton forming «The New Cars» (with no less than Todd Rundgren as a participating member!) for touring purposes, to get Ric to realize that (a) you only live once, (b) no matter what he does, he is still going to be remembered as the frontman for The Cars rather than a solo artist. Consequently, it is not amazing that The Cars eventually reunited; it is amazing that they had to wait more than twenty years to reunite. On the other hand, one should never underestimate the «been so long...» factor — with the band having passed into legend so long ago, the appearance of Move Like This, for many fans and critics alike, was akin to the second coming of Christ (or should we say, of Chrysler? no, not really funny).
While some reunion albums actually try to give you the impression that the artist is moving along with the times, Move Like This is not dicking around one iota — it is a straightforward attempt to recapture the vibe of The Cars, although, frankly speaking, the final result sounds more like Shake It Up, at least if you compare the respective roles of the guitar and the synth. Technically, it all works: Hawkes, Easton, and Ocasek still remember to choose the correct instrumental tones and pick the proper pop notes, while Jacknife Lee, an Irish musician who used to dabble in both punk rock and electronica, and is also substituting here for the deceased Orr on bass, assists the band in producing the album as if it were a time capsule. No wonder hardcore fans and critics were delighted — on the surface, it all sounds like a classic Cars album.
Beyond the surface, though, it's a little underwhelming: essentially, the record feels strangely purposeless. The opening single, ʽBlue Tipʼ, combines rough guitar riffage with technobleeps just like ʽGood Times Rollʼ, but the emotional atmosphere is different — instead of the old «confu­sed-lamenting» vibe, we get something more accusatory and angry (apparently, the song has a social message — "you believe in anything, they tell you how to think" etc.), but the message is not supported by the relatively weak pop hooks. There's nothing particularly wrong about the technobleeps, and I suppose that the fanfare-like riff of the chorus is kinda catchy, but the song on the whole is neither mindless fun nor an angry diatribe — something that's nice to listen to once or twice and then forget forever.
Unfortunately, the same feel applies to all the other nine tracks. It's The Cars-lite, pleasant and pointless; quite monotonous (I think about half of the songs share precisely the same mid-tempo beat) and without even a single stand-out number. Ah, if at least one of the album's two or three bal­lads had the magic of a ʽDriveʼ — but instead we get stuff like ʽTake Another Lookʼ, whose chorus is entirely predictable, no better or worse than any adult contemporary ballad ever written. And the uptempo stuff is just six or seven ways for Ocasek to tell us that he still can't get no satis­faction, but now he just resorts to minor variations on the same groove to get his point across, and this quickly becomes tedious.
Consequently, I can hardly stand it when people write mildly positive reviews of the album, saying «well, at least it's better than Door To Door, that's for sure». It is not frickin' better than Door To Door, because I'd at least take ʽFine Lineʼ and ʽGo Awayʼ over every single track on Move Like This — back then, The Cars were a struggling band caught in a web of internal con­tradictions, but the music still reflected living, vibrant feelings. Move Like This, in comparison, gives the impression of an impeccably dressed corpse, with everything intact and polished ex­cept for, you know, soul. And it would be an insult to The Cars to insist that they had never been much more than a plastic, glossy, superficially catchy pop band. Personally, I'd rather prefer to insult this one album than their entire career — by giving it a thumbs down and stating that this stillborn reunion should never have happened. (And, just for the record, not all reunions by legen­dary New Wave heroes were stillborn — Blondie's No Exit, for instance, sounds a dozen times more alive in comparison).

CELTIC FROST

MORBID TALES (1984)
1) Human / Into The Crypts Of Rays; 2) Visions Of Mortality; 3) Dethroned Emperor; 4) Morbid Tales; 5) Procrea­tion (Of The Wicked); 6) Return To The Eve; 7) Danse Macabre; 8) Nocturnal Fear; 9*) Circle Of The Tyrants; 10*) Visual Aggression; 11*) Suicidal Winds.
Celtic Frost used to be Hellhammer, a notoriously extreme metal band from Zürich, of all places: I know of no precedents before them for Swiss metal, and, in fact, I deeply suspect that many people might have confused them with Swedish metal bands in the early years. But then if they were Swedish, they'd have probably called themselves Nordic Frost (sidenote: apparently, there is a band now called Nordic Frost, and they are Swedish, so go figure). As it is, «Celtic» was pro­bably chosen because of Switzerland's Celtic past, and «Frost» because of their proximity to the Alps. Or because «frost» brings on associations with death — purely verbally, considering that the music of Celtic Frost is anything but frosty in nature.
For their first EP, Morbid Tales, the band lineup consisted of Thomas Gabriel Fischer, a.k.a. Tom Warrior, on guitars and vocals, and Martin Stricker, a.k.a. Martin Eric Ain, on bass — these two, with the exception of a short one-time break for Martin, would forever remain the core of the band. The drum work was handled by session musician Stephen Priestley, since by late 1984 the core duo had not yet settled upon a permanent percussionist. The original release was short, con­sisting of only six tracks; two more, including the title track, only appeared later on the expanded US version. Finally, the current CD edition usually throws on three additional bonus tracks, taken from the band's subsequent EP, Emperor's Return, which is a good thing, because that EP is usually rated very highly by the band's fans, yet hardly deserves a review of its own.
Assessing the originality and the impact of Celtic Frost's debut is a little hard these days, now that «black metal» is just a cliché and most of these bands are pathologically indistinguishable one from another. Apparently, though, the band was at the forefront of this subgenre, together with Bathory (who also released their first album in 1984) — the idea being that of combining the insane tempos and complex musicianship of thrash metal with the occultist / apocalyptic spirit of everybody from Black Sabbath to Venom. (Actually, Venom are usually credited with the inven­tion of «black metal» as such — if anything, that was the title of their second album — but they were certainly less extreme in their approach than Celtic Frost). In other words, Celtic Frost are a cross between Slayer and Venom, with a bit of Black Sabbath-y sludginess and a pinch of Mötor­head's blunt jackhammering thrown in for good measure.
That said, to me there are primarily two respectable subgenres of metal — «terrifying metal» and «comedic metal» — and early Celtic Frost are undeniably closer to the second one. One reason behind this are the vocals: Mr. Warrior, perpetuating the black metal stereotype, always sings as if he is either possessed by Satan's proxy, or suffering from a really bad case of constipation — which, come to think of it, may be one and the same from a certain philosophical point of view. (Check out the introduction to ʽDance Macabreʼ, where such a unity of process and purpose actually makes perfect sense). The second reason, of course, are the insane tempos, a problem most common to all forms of thrash or thrash-influenced metal; however, Celtic Frost are more reasonable here than Slayer, understanding the value of slowing down and even that of an occa­sional psychedelic interlude, to act as a bookmark between all the same-sounding gymnastics of heaviness. Still, nothing here is even remotely «morbid» or properly terrifying; in the end, it all depends on just how cartoonishly evil they can make their riffs and atmospheres, in order for us, future listeners, to get our healthy kicks.
And I will be the first to admit that Morbid Tales has its share of solid metal riffs. I do not care that much for stuff like ʽInto The Crypts Of Raysʼ: it owes its whole schtick to Mötorhead without sharing Mötorhead's level of catchiness (as a singer, Lemmy is downright Pavarotti next to Tom Warrior), and simply gallops along without offering anything fresh. Conversely, ʽVisions Of Morta­lityʼ is just too slow, and sounds like a slightly more high-pitched and boring rehash of some of classic Sabbath's ideas. But things begin picking up by the time ʽDethroned Emperorʼ comes along — also owing its existence to ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ, it finally manages to offer us a useful variation on that eternal chugging theme (largely thanks to an awesome snake-like arpeggio flourish in between the main iterations of the riff). And finally, the first truly awe­some song arrives in the guise of ʽProcreation (Of The Wicked)ʼ, where Tom teaches his guitar to alternate between painful howling and fierce growling (I suppose that this is meant to represent the birth pangs of the alleged "wicked", but could be more of that constipation thing — who really cares?).
Too bad that, from there to the end, only three tracks remain, one of which (ʽDance Macabreʼ) is, as I already mentioned, more of an avantgarde noise collage, something like a tentative musical representation of a Bosch painting of hell — and it's pretty cool that way. But, as a bonus, you do get the other tracks from Emperor's Return; recorded approximately one year later, they feature slightly improved production values and at least one solid riff-rocker (ʽSuicidal Windsʼ) that tries to eschew the boredom of generic thrash by slightly slowing down the tempo and trying to intro­duce some moderately discernible chords into the structure...
...ah well, who am I kidding? Most of these songs are ultimately one, and modern young metal audiences will probably not be impressed with it, considering how far beyond it the technical boundaries of speed / thrash / black metal have been pushed since. In reality, the album is more interesting from a purely historical perspective: it made a truly deep impression back in the day, and marked merely the first chapter in the surprisingly versatile, almost chameleonic career of these rugged Swiss warriors. But ʽProcreationʼ is a genuinely cool song, regardless of historic context, and in limited doses, their overall sound might even be more fun than Slayer's — pre­cisely because they are somewhat less technical and somewhat more punkish in their musical retelling of the world's innumerous evils. That said, far be it from me to recommend this stuff to anybody who is not already deeply immersed in the tempting intricacies of heavy metal.