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. The Cars would seem to define this trope. Their eponymous 1978 debut contains so many classic rock staples, a modern listener could mistake it for a greatest hits collection. 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.
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. Pairing the two helps escape the conventional wisdom that has reduced their respective reputations to a pair of blurbs. Candy-O is generally seen as the explicit sequel to The Cars, while Panorama is the dark detour that tanked on the charts. Both of these assessments have some grounding in reality, but the truth for both records is considerably more complex.
Take Candy-O, which followed their debut by almost exactly a year. Superficially, the album offers another dose of stylish, detached pop with hooks so finely honed, they may have come off an assembly line. 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. 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. Indeed, Candy-O is where the Cars set up shop in the Billboard charts: It went all the way to No. 3 on the Top 200 (The Cars went no further than No. 18), and “Let’s Go” came close to breaking the Top 10, peaking at No. 14.
Despite 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. “Shoo Be Doo,” a snippet of dark, cloistered synths wedged in between two far more ebullient moments, evokes Suicide, while “Got a Lot on My Head,” assisted by the carnivalesque keyboards of Greg Hawkes, suggests the jittery, high-octane spite of Elvis Costello & the Attractions. But where Costello wears his bile on his sleeve, Ocasek and his co-lead vocalist Benjamin Orr specialize in dispassion. No matter how loud, furious, or, as in the case of “It’s All I Can Do,” lovely the band sounded, both singers—their timbres and phrasing so similar, it’s possible to play Candy-O a dozen times without realizing they’re swapping leads—rarely deign to convey anything approaching enthusiasm. This coolness gives the music a steely sexiness that suits the Alberto Vargas pin-up illustration gracing the album cover. This isn’t music for the heart: With its stylized surfaces, it appeals to the senses, offering satisfaction in its high performance.
Panorama doubles down on the Cars’ inherent disaffection, ratcheting up the precision of the rhythms to the point where they almost seem robotic. The introduction of synthesized drums enhances the impression that the band prefers mechanical movement to the swing and mess of rock’n’roll, which may be the reason why Panorama underperformed commercially: It went platinum upon its release, largely based on momentum, but its single, “Touch and Go,” barely scraped the Top 40, topping out at No. 37. By stripping away the stadium-rock affectations of Candy-O—thinning the beefy bottom end created by bassist Orr and drummer David Robinson, while pushing Hawkes’ keyboards over Easton’s guitars in the mix—the Cars wind up emphasizing their artiness while staying fixated on Ocasek’s sharp pop hooks.
In the context of Panorama, those hooks, whether guitar riffs or vocal melodies, don’t necessarily contribute to the kind of songs that would tear up the charts. Often, Ocasek appears to be writing meta-pop songs—“Don’t Tell Me No” and “Getting Through” even have passing lyrical allusions to oldies by Lesley Gore and Buddy Knox—as if he’s in the process of deconstructing pop to figure out how it works. That’s why Panorama feels like the logical conclusion to the Cars’ streamlined new wave: Even if it doesn’t deliver the pure pleasures of its predecessors, it captures the group running like a well-oiled machine.
Rhino’s expanded editions of Candy-O and Panorama, available both on vinyl and CD, are anchored by nice remasters of the original albums, but the bonus tracks are also noteworthy. Along with “That’s It” (a chipper B-side that sounds like a B-side), Candy-O is fleshed out with alternate, earlier versions that underscore the material’s harder rock edge. Conversely, the bonus material on Panorama—three previously unreleased songs (“Shooting for You,” “Be My Baby,” “The Edge”) plus the B-side “Don’t Go to Pieces”—offers further supporting evidence for the album’s dark charms. As welcome as it is to have these extra cuts, the truly valuable thing about this round of Cars reissues is how it shifts the focus away from the band’s enduring warhorses to the music that isn’t so well known. This lesser-heard material reveals what a smart, inventive pop group they were.
