You expected the Cars, reformed without the late bass-playing vocalist Benjamin Orr, to come out with a sad song. Not a track called “Sad Song” that sounds anything but.
In fact, the lead single from the forthcoming Move Like This, the Cars’ first studio album in 24 years, boasts all the crunchy nerve of their best hit-making sides. That starts with this spiked-up Elliot Easton guitar riff straight out of “Best Friend’s Girl.” Next comes the zippy metronomic David Robinson rhythms that once drove “Since You’re Gone” right into my earhole, and then a swooping Heartbreak City-era wash from keyboard player Greg Hawkes. Lead singer Ric Ocasek, sounding not much worse for the wear, enters with the same detached cool that made “You Might Think” a staple on MTV back in the day.
Sure, as Hawkes continues orchestrating this propulsive wall of new-wave scronks, there’s an undercurrent of loss. But it’s hard-eyed, very modern: “Too many heartaches, waiting to strike,” Ocasek blurts out, in a pleasing hiccup. “Too many clowns, saying everything’s all right.” That determined tough-mindedness, as the chorus (it’s just a sad song and it won’t take long) billows up, is something that I just wasn’t expecting.
Ocasek and Co. haven’t just gotten back together, and haven’t just come to terms with everything that happened before. The Cars have definitively reclaimed their own sound from subsequent acts like the Bravery and, along the way, found a path to beginning again.
Sure, “Sad Song” could’ve used Orr’s feathered background vocals as a nest for that leaping chorus. It remains, however, an utterly satisfying return. The Cars are roaring back not as a 1980s curio, but instead as a third-act rock band with something new to say.
The Cars’ seventh studio release, ‘Move Like This,’ is scheduled to be released on May 10, 2011, by the Concord Music Group. Orr wasn’t replaced; instead, the bass portions were reportedly either programmed or performed by Hawkes and producer Jacknife Lee, who’s helmed R.E.M.’s ‘Accelerate’ and ‘Collapse into Now.’
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I’ve been anxiously awaiting this album since I got over my feelings of reformation without Orr. While “Sad Song” is a good start, I was hearing too much “Victim Of Love” in it, just as I heard too much “Touch and Go” in “Blue Tip.” At least they’re referencing themselves instead of trying to sound like someone else, but I was surprised by how closely they’ve stuck to their own.
I do miss those harmony back-ups. Maybe there will be more on the album itself. Could you imagine either “Victim of Love” or “Touch and Go” without those gang-harmonies in the chorus? I can’t.