14.ĭespite this consolidation of mainstream success-something surely assisted by Ric Ocasek’s facility for pop hooks that feel at once icy and alluring- Candy-O pledges its allegiance to art rock and punk by slipping in salutes to the Cars’ peers on the margins. 18), and “Let’s Go” came close to breaking the Top 10, peaking at No. 3 on the Top 200 ( The Cars went no further than No. Indeed, Candy-O is where the Cars set up shop in the Billboard charts: It went all the way to No. It sounds not just like new wave-the umbrella term for any pop-oriented counterculture music that arose in the wake of punk-but album rock. Listen closely, though, and Candy-O boasts bolder production that emphasizes the band’s heavy attack and gives plenty of space for guitarist Elliot Easton to spin out composed solos. Superficially, the album offers another dose of stylish, detached pop with hooks so finely honed, they may have come off an assembly line. Take Candy-O, which followed their debut by almost exactly a year. Both of these assessments have some grounding in reality, but the truth for both records is considerably more complex. Candy-O is generally seen as the explicit sequel to The Cars, while Panorama is the dark detour that tanked on the charts. Pairing the two helps escape the conventional wisdom that has reduced their respective reputations to a pair of blurbs. Those two records-1979’s Candy-O and 1980’s Panorama-received expanded reissues in July, 2017, roughly a year after the group’s entire catalog got boxed up by Rhino, and long after the debut received a double-disc deluxe treatment. But the band is the exception that proves the rule: They managed to move forward from The Cars with a pair of albums that both refined and expanded their tightly wound new wave. Their eponymous 1978 debut contains so many classic rock staples, a modern listener could mistake it for a greatest hits collection. The Cars would seem to define this trope. It’s a tale as old as time: A band arrives on the scene with an album so fully formed, it seems impossible that they could improve upon it, let alone escape its gravitational pull.
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