The Cars: Door To Door : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Ever since the cold, brittle pop of 1980's Panorama proved to be a dead end, the Cars have been in retreat. Relegating most of their quirky tendencies to outside projects – Ric Ocasek's two solo albums and guitarist Elliot Easton's guitar-pop-fest Change/No Change – the band turned its own albums into monolithic, efficient hit machines. That process culminated with 1984's Heartbreak City, an often stiflingly homogenous record that restored the band's chart status but also threatened to turn them into an Eighties version of the Electric Light Orchestra. The Cars may have had their cool-and-calculated act down cold since their first album, but Heartbreak City hinted that technology was beginning to get the best of them.

Perhaps the Cars themselves realized this impasse, for Door to Door – their first studio album since Heartbreak City – attempts to pry open their increasingly suffocating sound. The album is also meant to be a statement of reunification: Ocasek produced it, and the group even re-recorded two previously unreleased songs ("Ta Ta Wayo Wayo" and "Leave or Stay") from its early days to bring it all back home. But while Door to Door reveals a band trying to break out of its own stylistic straitjacket, it also shows just how tight that jacket has become.

The most arresting moments on the album come when Ocasek as producer strips down the band. The brisk, locomotive-paced "Everything You Say" is built on acoustic guitars, a Byrds-like guitar solo from Easton and low-tech drums and piano; it's one of the most refreshing tracks the Cars have recorded in years. With Easton's power chording again taking the lead, the band also rips through two metallic crunchers, "Strap Me In" and "Double Trouble." The former – a smart, lusty rocker – qualifies as the sexiest song the band has ever done ("And when you tell me to/I want to give it/Just like you want me to," grunts Ocasek), while the latter adds an element of back-street menace rare to Cars records.

Although cuts like "Double Trouble" are elementary guitar rock, the band performs them somewhat stiffly, as if the concept of cutting loose were off-limits. At times, it seems that the band members have become so technically accomplished that they don't quite know how to rock anymore. The summer-fun ditty "Ta Ta Wayo Wayo" is particularly awkward. It has the stiffest-sounding boogie piano since Linda Ronstadt's remake of Chuck Berry's "Back in the U.S.A."

The rest of Door to Door reworks more standard Cars formulas. As a producer, Ocasek hasn't ventured far from the high-tech sheen bestowed by previous producers Roy Thomas Baker and Mutt Lange. Greg Hawkes's wall of synthesizers swamps everything in the immediate vicinity, and the vocal harmonies – another back-to-the-roots homage – are so gauzy that they frequently threaten to capsize lightweight Ocasek songs like "Wound Up on You," "Coming Up You" and the paint-by-numbers first single, "You Are the Girl." Lyrically, the group hasn't progressed much beyond its initial perspective of alienated girl meets alienated boy, either – "You Are the Girl" and "Wound Up on You" pretty much sum up their contents in their titles.

This may indeed be the sound of the Cars getting back to basics. After all, the band has never really deviated much from the framework of its first album. That is made clear by listening to the revamped versions of the two early Cars songs. Although both are nearly a decade old, neither song sounds at all out of place on the glossy Door to Door. Some would call this arrested development; others may point to such consistency as an example of the group's unerring craft. Either way, the Cars have come full cycle, with their contradictions and tunefulness intact.