The Cars: Complete Greatest Hits

I’m normally loathe to review compilations, because they either feature all the best bits of a band’s discography, thus making the “essential listening” part of my review redundant, or I haven’t gotten into their music fully, meaning the songs I like are the only ones I listen to and can immediately identify with, while the other songs go unlistened and unappreciated. I could have made an exception to reviewing compilations, but there are a great deal of compilations I quite enjoy, though they haven’t yet inspired me to go out and explore the band’s full catalog, so to deny a review to a compilation wouldn’t be fair at all.

Yes, I take this music review blog very seriously, why do you ask?

With that in mind, the first compilation I’m going to review is The Cars’ Complete Greatest Hits. I distinctly remember riding around with a friend, in a slightly altered state of mind, singing the hell out of these songs. The Cars are dumb and enjoyable: easy to sing along to, with immediately and occasionally irritatingly catchy hooks and melodies. The emphasis is on fun, and any attempt to take them seriously is futile. However, that can be a detriment in some cases: I consider them to be an amalgam of Squeeze and Cheap Trick. The former because Ric Ocasek is capable of writing wonderful pop songs, and the latter because they have a sense of humor about themselves; however, Squeeze was able to balance their pop songs with some heavier subject matters, occasionally writing in different styles about darker influences (loneliness, alcoholism, etc.), and Cheap Trick was more powerful, instrumentally. The Cars are a New Wave/pop band, with guitars sharing valuable tape space with synthesizers and drum machines; that’s not a bad thing, of course, but listening to the 20 songs on this compilation, they simply stuck to a winning formula and failed to evolve.

I won’t go through all of the songs one by one, because I hope to acquire the band’s catalog at some point in the future, at which time I can go a little more indepth into their material. But, all of the songs on here are excellent, with six extracted from their eponymous debut album, three from Candy-O and Shake It Up, one each from Panorama, an earlier Greatest Hits album, and final album Door To Door, and five from Heartbeat City. Even casual music fans who might not be familiar with The Cars can almost immediately identify at least half of the songs just by listening to a classic rock radio station or watching a movie either from or set in the 1980s; or, if you were so lucky to have been inundated with Circuit City ads before they went out of business, ‘Just What I Needed’ was adopted as their pseudo-theme song, used in many a commercial and oversaturating my own personal appreciation for it to the point that I can’t even listen to it without wanting to kill myself. Or maybe just buy some electronic gadget.

From a personal point of view, it’s some of the lesser-known (but still popular) songs that I prefer. ‘Good Times Roll’ is probably my favorite, because of the power block of backing vocals and the thundering timpani (God, I love a good timpani); ‘Moving In Stereo’ is another great song, not only because of the memorable scene from Fast Times At Ridgemont High, but because the layers upon layers of synthesizers interlock beautifully to form a thick, muscular backing, detracting from the slightly pointless lyrics; ‘You Might Think’, certainly not a lesser-known song by any stretch of the imagination, is just plain damn fun. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a bit of filler here, especially the last few songs, with the album petering out with the inconsequential ‘You Are The Girl’, which sounds like the band is merely going through the motions.

Regardless of some of the song selections, Complete Greatest Hits is the place to start your Cars collection, and while it misses out on some of their even lesser-known singles (‘Double Life’, ‘Gimme Some Slack’, ‘Victim of Love’, for instance), it’s the perfect compilation for anyone who might have heard that “Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?” song and wants to explore their catalog. And that’s exactly why I find compilations simultaneously useful and useless: they’re excellent launching pads for beginners, but rarely offer anything worthwhile for diehard fans. Considering I’m still a beginner when it comes to The Cars, Complete Greatest Hits will suffice nicely until I decide to make the plunge and buy some more of their albums.