Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This album WAS the summer of '84., July 26, 2005
Beaches, convertibles, MTV showing real videos. Think Andy Warhol flash-cutting grainy images to "Hello Again." Watch Ric Ocasek walk on water during "Magic." Think of cruising to "You Might Think." And remain in awe of the late Ben Orr's best vocal since the debut, on the groundbreaking smash ballad, "Drive."
That's what makes The Cars' final great album, "Heartbeat City," their most consistent album since that perfect first disc. It marked a creative highwater level in the band's evolution, mixing in the best of their Buddy Holly pop with their "Panorama" darkness. It also moved away from their Roy Thomas Baker sterile sheen to "Mutt" Lange's polished pop glow (he who made Def Leppard both shattering and melodic) and fed it to the masses as fantastic cotton candy summer tunes. Place this record next to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," Huey Lewis' "Sports," ZZ Top's "Eliminator," Van Halen's "1984" and Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell," and you had the party records that stuck in your memory for that year.
"Heartbeat City" still holds fast to its best moments. It gave The Cars' their biggest seller to that date, and their highest charting single. But it also gave them one of the most haunting songs in their canon, with the mysterious title track. Vaguely hinting at what almost sounds like a drug addiction, the enigmatic Jacki has "happy days we count on thumbs." The domicile of "Heartbeat City" is both an alluring and distant place, and Ocasek mutters "it's my life" as the song fades away. Oddly enough, that song bids goodbye to The Car's last decent album; I am sure there aren't too many folks with ecstatic summer memories of "Door To Door."
Which also begs the question; this was a major seller from a band that had consistent platinum plus successes. Why are their no remastered Cars albums other than the debut? An album this great really deserves better than the old, flat original CD transfer. An upgrade is due, and soon, please!
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New Wave Becomes Pop, June 29, 2002
When The Cars entered the music scene they were part of the New Wave music that would become the dominant music of the 80s. However, as happens with many variations on a theme, New Wave became the New Pop as pop music realigned itself with New Wave influence. As the 80s drew to a close, new wave began to sound like old hat, and a little dated as the newness wore off the no longer novel sound of synthesizers imitating a host of instruments with occasional sound effects.
"Heartbeat City" was released in 1984 as pop was starting to realign itself to the influence of New Wave. Change is not accepted well by many people, and thus this CD (read "album" as in vinyl album at the time) was not well-received by some of The Cars earliest fans, who saw it as more pop than New Wave. However, if you take this CD and pretend it was released in 1980, it would not have been considered pop and would have been another then sort of counter-culture album.
So when you read reviews, consider whether the writer is being objective regarding the CD or whether they are expressing their opinion of how the CD was received by the public at the time. If you are a rebel in any era, the last thing you want to hear is that one of your icons was accepted by "The Establishment".
Forgetting the context of when the album was released, this album is classic New Wave 80s music. Several of the songs are instantly recognizable as pop classics that will forever be among the greatest pop songs ever recorded, albeit with the 80s New Wave flavor.
Probably the three most readily recognizable of the songs are "Drive", which would be a great song in any era, "Magic", which also has a truly great video to go with it, and "You Might Think".
As you move away from these well-known songs, the other songs are classic Cars, with Ric Ocasek's voice often taking the lead vocal. Among the remaining songs, I especially like "It's Not the Night", a song about a couple where one of the two is getting ready to break up, but the other one doesn't really want it to happen. Two great points about this song: first, the word love is not used once; second, the song doesn't mention "he" or "she" even once, thus the song could be about either.
"Why Can't I have You" is another excellent song. Lush vocals including an excellent harmony fully explore the unusually evocative lyrics. Check out a couple of lines from the song:
"glossy mouth taste untamed moving"
"your eyes like mica lethal pout hinting"
Lyrics like this do not come in teen pop passages. This music is very serious, with some of the best lyrics by any rock group.
Enough details. The rest of the album is Cars. Heavy beats. Cool lyrics. Lots of keyboards (it WAS the 80s!). But the guitars and drums make themselves known. This album represents 80s music at its peak, and was a harbinger of New Wave becoming pop and pop becoming New Wave. The music is a little dated. It is generally instantly recognizable as 80s music. But that is as it should be. After all, isn't a lot of music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s readily recognizable as being from that era? That means that this album is being recognized as one of the great representative albums from its era.
Great rock is great forever. As it ages, sometimes it is reinterpreted in the contect of now, but, as with fine wines, age usually enhances our ability to understand what we heard then. Go back in time to an era when rock music was trying to find a new direction and listen to a great album by a group that helped rock music to find its new direction.
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24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Sloppy mastering, March 4, 2009
This "audiophile" CD is amazingly full of errors- the original flow of the album, as intended by producer Robert John Mutt Lange and the Cars has been ruined by sloppy mastering. On the original vinyl, cassette, and CD, the songs went one right after another with no gaps. In this version, the mastering engineer, Steve Hoffman, decided to put gaps between the tracks, making this "Heartbeat City by Steve Hoffman featuring the Cars". Also, this disc is labeled as an "HDCD", which stands for high definition CD. Some higher-end players can play these discs back with a little clearer sound. Well this disc is semi-HDCD, as during playback the HDCD light on my Denon 3910 went out near the end of several songs, sometimes adding an audible click. I also tried my friend's Oppo, and it did the same. As for the packaging, the lyrics came with the original versions, but missing on this one. Not very good quality control.
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