The Cars – Move Like This
If any band can claim to have gone through a time warp, it’s The Cars. After a 24-year hiatus they have returned with album number seven and it sounds just like they never left. You can close your eyes and just see the bad hairstyles.
When a band returns to the wars mostly intact (original band member Benjamin Orr sadly passed away in 2000 from pancreatic cancer) and sounds just the same as they did before they left, they are usually pillared in the press. This isn’t entirely fair.
With so many varied and idiosyncratic groups out there today, what’s wrong with a band delivering something tried and true. Besides if you are looking for cutting edge music from a band that enjoyed their career zenith in the late seventies/early eighties you are looking in the wrong place anyway.
Move Like This follows the band’s former album template to a T. There are the quirky radio friendly tracks like Blue Tip (with its cool retro keyboard bleeps) and Keep On Knocking (with a somewhat surprisingly heavy guitar line) or the earnest and emotional respite provided by songs like Soon and Take Another Look.
Music has always been good at setting the time and place of previous good times and if The Cars illicit any memories of previous transgressions, then maybe you didn’t do as many drugs back then as you thought you had. As for the listeners of today, these tracks provide an interesting glimpse of an entirely different era. Rob Hudson www.thecars.org
also featured
Tenacious D – Rize Of The Fenix Comedy and music have never been the most comfortable of bedfellows.
Read more >>
Allan Holdsworth – Hard Hat Area When you have a musician with as much facility on their chosen
instrument as Allan Holdsworth has on guitar, there is absolutely no
limitation on what can actually be played.
Read more >>
Jack White – Blunderbuss With a work ethic and musical output rivalled by few if any, Jack White
sets aside all of those numerous other projects to create a set of songs
under his own name.
Read more >>
The Decemberists - We All Raise Our Voices
to the Air (Live Songs 04.11-08.11) Facing more obstacles than most in translating their studio
confectionary into a meaty live sound, The Decemberists have attempted
just such a thing with We All Raise Our Voices to the Air. Read more >>
White Rabbits – Milk Famous Using their sophomore album, It's Frightening as a template, White Rabbits take a stab at progression.
Read more >>
Van Halen – A Different Kind of Truth Do some popular music statements come out of a time warp or do they create their own? Read more >>
Slivovitz – Bani Ahead When you have superlative players’ on board, things can easily digress
into instrumental insurrection, on Bani Ahead, Slivovitz side step this
problem by being almost completely consumed by the groove. Read more >>
Big Deal – Lights Out All band notoriety aside, is there any subject matter that creates more column inches than love?
Read more >>
My Best Fiend – In Ghostlike Fading Like the Werner Herzog film the band is named after, My Best Fiend delivers an album deep in duality.
Read more >>