The Cars: Candy-O : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It's almost inevitable that Candy-O, the Cars' second album, doesn't seem nearly as exciting as their first. The element of surprise is gone, and the band hasn't been able to come up with anything new to replace it. Candy-O is an elaborately constructed, lively, entertaining LP that's packed with good things. And it's got a wonderful title. But it's a little too disciplined, a shade too predictable. You never get the idea that these guys are going out on a limb, reaching for something dramatically beyond the safe borders of their proven appeal. Instead, there's a sense of relying on established devices, of shaping the songs to fit "the Cars sound," that's unusual in a group so young, and the record sounds familiar the first time you hear it. Candy-O is a good album that never even remotely threatens to turn into a great one.

On The Cars, the devices were already extensively worked out, but they weren't pat. There was always an element of risk, a hint that the whole careful structure might crack under the strain. Part of what made "Just What I Needed" so affecting was the listener's feeling that the band's emotions were running ahead of the music, outracing the singer's attempts to hold them back. And there were wonderful moments, as in "You're All I've Got Tonight," when the arty concept did give way, and rock & roll desperation took over. That doesn't happen here. Instead of loosening up, the Cars have opted for a chilly precision, refining their techniques until they're icily impeccable. The ironic romanticism is never allowed to be anything more than ironic, and the tone is always kept under immaculate control.

Candy-O's cover — a Vargas pinup of a tawny-haired woman sprawled on the hood of a car, her face provocatively turned away from us—is a clever, almost-too-perfect icon for the group, and none of the songs even tries to get beyond that facade. They're all about enigmatic women who don't put out (or who do put out, but remain enigmatic), and there's a carefully oblique background of cars, nightspots and art-deco furniture. The Cars boast an adolescent's view of glamour, and in this sense, Ric Ocasek's vision is sharp and true. But his insistence on detaching himself from its passion and cultivating an all-knowing distance to prove that he's really on top of all this stuff is adolescent, too—and it limits him. In "Lust for Kicks," Ocasek's so busy piling up acidulous details about a hiply dècadent modern couple ("He's got his plastic sneakers/She's got her robuck purse") that the decadence never gets close enough to tell us anything. He doesn't get his hands dirty, and he should.

In "Let's Go" (the single, and the best cut on the LP), Ocasek's ambivalence about his material does work. The driving hook seems to pull the singer into the song almost against his will, and the tiny pause between "When she says" and "let's go" illuminates the whole complex sense of attraction and alienation, danger and mystery, implied in this seduction. When the hook comes in again to take the singer away, you're caught up in the swirl of motion. Other moments are just as vivid. In "Nightspots," Greg Hawkes' synthesizer jabs and jumps like the flashing lights on a rainy, late-night highway, and the tune's hopped-up rhythms and stuttering singing have a tense, jittery momentum that's exactly right. And "Candy-O" itself is very nice, with some terse, churning guitar and a vocal just attenuated and yearning enough to make the heroine's coolness appear authentically felt instead of being merely presented.

"Since I Held You," "You Can't Hold On Too Long" and especially "Got a Lot on My Head" are all effective tracks. (On the entire record, only "Shoo Be Doo" lapses into arty contrivance and doesn't click on any level.) But even the finest songs are cast too evenly in the same mold. Since they're nearly all structured around a similar guitar-and-keyboards counterpoint, they tend to blur into each other. Despite the streamlined texture and the smoothly proficient playing, Candy-O doesn't seem quite complete.

That the hooks aren't quite as distinctive as they were on The Cars can be put down to second-album strain — and most of them are quite passable anyway. It's the way the band's attitude is starting to jell into something mannered and overbearing that's bother-some, all the more so because it doesn't seem necessary. There's not much sense of a real personality at work on Candy-O, and what does come through is often manipulative. "It's All I Can Do" calculatedly recycles the "Just What I Needed" hook but to less-telling effect. It's simply cold. Instead of the haunted bittersweetness of "All Mixed Up," the new LP closes with an opaque downer called, unconvincingly, "The Dangerous Type."

If anything, the Cars are even more facile musically than they were before, but that same facility makes Candy-O sound like glib product too much of the time. It doesn't feel urgent the way the first record did. On The Cars, the group found a perfect middle ground between the New Wave's revisionist spirit and the mass audience's growing conservatism. These guys didn't catch the spirit of the time so much as perform a neat balancing act between its contradictions. Wit and epic exuberance, not artsy trappings, made the Cars special, and they haven't given us nearly enough of those qualities here. What the band doesn't seem to realize is that all that tight-assed posturing is trite and ultimately tiresome. Ric Ocasek & Company are a more interesting, less gimmicky group in almost every way than Cheap Trick, but they've never done anything as humanly moving as "Surrender."

I don't dislike Candy-O—after all, it sounds better than practically anything else on the radio—and I still like the Cars. They're a good band. Their virtue is they're never anything less than that. Their limitation is they've yet to prove they're anything more.