Vacation : The Go-Go's : Review : Rolling Stone

At a time when most rock bands deplete their store of ideas in the space of a single album, the second LP from the Go-Go's effects an amusing miracle. Vacation takes the same themes that made this group's debut album a Top Ten smash–dating, dancing and dishing the dirt–and turns these evanescent pleasures into passionate, even important, music.

I was one of about four people in America who did not think that this Los Angeles quintet's 1981 debut album was a modern girl-group classic. Beauty and the Beat was cleverly produced and charmingly good-humored, but too frequently it veered from cute to self-conscious cutesiness. These young women seemed all too aware of how beguiling their saucy chatter and crinkly miniskirts would be to a rock audience desperate for some innocent fun.

What Vacation brings to the band's brand of squeal-appeal pop is a fresh curiosity about the world and a treasure trove of precise details. This is the sound of women at work: when the band members slam into "Vacation," you know it's not just something they want; it's not a vestige of the idle party girls they portrayed on the first LP. Instead, Belinda Carlisle's tight, strained vocal tells you that a vacation is something they need–proof of the nonstop touring band they've become.

Carlisle's wispily exhausted tone on "Vacation" is just one of an array of new voices she's developed for this record. Her singing has become deliriously witty; within her high, narrow range, she's located a full persona. Thus she can trill sweetly on "Girl of 100 Lists" one moment, and then come on frazzled and disgusted a few minutes later in "We Don't Get Along."

It helps, of course, that Vacation is filled with first-rate songwriting that offers Carlisle a wide range of emotions and characters. Where Beauty and the Beat was stuffed with New Wave pom-pom cheers like "We Got the Beat," Vacation opts for quick studies of moods and relationships. The album is one long meditation on escape–from the road, from men, from daily drudgery. Sometimes the band makes a game out of its chores. On "Get Up and Go," the Go-Go's exhort each other to pick up the pace: they could be jogging or stuck in the middle of a flagging onstage performance. Then there's Jane Wiedlin's "Girl of 100 Lists," a devilish parody of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. Instead of caressing sunshine and kittens, however, Wiedlin invites Carlisle to sing about teenage girls' obsessions: "What shall I wear/Who will I kiss," Carlisle muses dreamily.

In fact, as the album progresses, dreams themselves take on great significance. For Go-Go's trapped on the road, dreams are a primary means of escape. The loveliest expression of this is "This Old Feeling," a reverie written by guitarists Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey. It's a perfect pop song: an ethereal melody is anchored by Kathy Valentine's bass as Carlisle's voice skims the surface of a pleasant memory just beyond reach. Rarely has the woozy pleasure of a good daydream been rendered more movingly in rock music.

Sometimes, though, the daydreaming takes on a desperate edge. In "Worlds Away," Gina Schock's drums throb distantly, like a fading pulse, and Carlisle sings an eerie chorus in a depressed croon: "I find myself wanting/To be sleeping/To be dreaming/To be worlds away...." Instead of the soothing effect the melody suggests at first, the song becomes a chilling expression of exhaustion and despair. As written by Wiedlin and Valentine, "Worlds Away" joins the lonely cries of women from Virginia Woolf to Marilyn Monroe for comfort and an otherworldly warmth.

If you think it's ludicrous to invoke Virginia Woolf in the presence of the Go-Go's, well, that's your problem. Vacation is fully cognizant of its own ambitions while remaining true to its creators' motto of female fun, fun, fun. It's not as if this is a perfect record: the band's cover of "Cool Jerk," a tune the Go-Go's have been yammering ever since their earliest days as New Wave know-nothings in L. A., sounds just as dumb and dull as they've always made it sound.

But nearly every song on Vacation is eager to demonstrate some new skill. "He's So Strange," for instance, might be just another I-don't-know-what-boys-like anthem except for the cutting guitar line that razors across the last verse – it slices the song with urgent aggression. You're left feeling that Carlisle doesn't think this strange boy is worth another second of her thoughts, and that decision is exhilarating–for her, for us.

The Go-Go's don't just sing songs about fun anymore; they toy with the idea of fun, asking: What does it mean? Is it worth it? And they turn it inside-out on "It's Everything but Partytime," surely the most dour song ever written about hedonism: "We're only looking for a good time/But what we get is empty rhyme.... It's everything but partytime." Does the it in this song refer to the newfound stardom of the Go-Go's? Will they survive their own good times? Stay tuned for the next vacation.