Though they've always tended to be testy traveling companions, the Cars have cantankerously outdone themselves this time: Panorama isn't merely a joyless joyride, it's an out-and-out drag. There's probably never been another young superstar band that's toyed with success more languidly than the Cars. Their debut album contained some wonderfully jittery, apprehensive music. Indeed, what made The Cars such a smash was the sweat of desperation that beaded the Turtle Wax shine of songs like "My Best Friend's Girl" and "Just What I Needed."
In retrospect, it seems as if songwriter Ric Ocasek assembled those hits in a rare sympathetic, chipper mood. On Candy-O and Panorama,
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Ocasek's compositions offer only two extremes: incoherence and self-absorption. What these extremes share is a uniformly morose mood. All of which would be fine if the material were compelling, but it's not.
Panorama is the New Wave version of a bad William Burroughs novel like
The Ticket That Exploded. Each line is uttered in the same flat, sinister voice, while the lyrics are sarcastic cut-and-paste jobs that mock our efforts to make sense of them. Producer Roy Thomas Baker's sonic chiaroscuro places the vocals in stark, high relief, yet who wants to ponder babble like this from "Gimme Some Slack": "I want to shake like liguardia/Magic mouth in the sun/Train ride to the court-yard/Before you can run"?
They're all like that. One cut after another consists of phrases chosen from a thesaurus of irritation, as the LP's hero complains about the unattainability of some faceless woman. But the combination of vocal moaning and linguistic imprecision simply suggests that the narrator doesn't care – about her or the words that singers Ocasek and Benjamin Orr declaim.
Confronted with such smug opacity, the other Cars spend a lot of time trying to sound nonchalant and, perhaps, uninvolved. Greg Hawkes sets his synthesizer on the most elementary mode, alternating monster-movie ominousness with Roadrunner beep-beeps. David Robinson's rapid drumming is the aural equivalent of the way Wile E. Coyote's legs pump over empty air after he's run off the edge of a cliff. Only lead guitarist Elliot Easton is permitted to add colorful riffs to this bleak black-and-white record, but in the pretentiously minimalistic context of Panorama, Easton's energy can't help but seem florid at times. It's not his fault, though, and his prancing, post-Beatles pop runs in "Running to You" and the title tune are among the album's few authentic pleasures. The one other moment of exhilaration comes at the very end, when Ocasck and Baker grant us the single loose, funny track on the LP: "Up and Down" sounds like the great undiscovered followup to T-Rex' "Jeepster."
Probably, the proper reference point for Panorama isn't the Cars' earlier music, but rather Ric Ocasek's production work for the avant-garde/insult-joke duo, Suicide. On
Ric Ocasek's wonderfully deadpan, almost zombified delivery is the unifying factor on tunes that mingle heavy, often dark, synth sounds with effortlessly upbeat New Wavey guitar rockers on The Cars' third outing. Listen to the "it-shoulda-been-a-bigger hit" "Touch and Go" and then follow it up with Tom Petty's even greater "You Got Lucky" from two years later.
