appeal. Instead, there's a sense of relying on established devices, of shaping the songs to fit "the Cars sound," that's unusual in a group so young, and the record sounds familiar the first time you hear it. Candy-O is a good album that never even remotely threatens to turn into a great one.

On The Cars, the devices were already extensively worked out, but they weren't pat. There was always an element of risk, a hint that the whole careful structure might crack under the strain. Part of what made "Just What I Needed" so affecting was the listener's feeling that the band's emotions were running ahead of the music, outracing the singer's attempts to hold them back. And there were wonderful moments, as in "You're All I've Got Tonight," when the arty concept did give way, and rock & roll desperation took over. That doesn't happen here. Instead of loosening up, the Cars have opted for a chilly precision, refining their techniques until they're icily impeccable. The ironic romanticism is never allowed to be anything more than ironic, and the tone is always kept under immaculate control.

Candy-O's cover — a Vargas pinup of a tawny-haired woman sprawled on the hood of a car, her face provocatively turned away from us—is a clever, almost-too-perfect icon for the group, and none of the songs even tries to get beyond that facade. They're all about enigmatic women who don't put out (or who do put out, but remain enigmatic), and there's a carefully oblique background of cars, nightspots and art-deco furniture. The Cars boast an adolescent's view of glamour, and in this sense, Ric Ocasek's vision is sharp and true. But his insistence on detaching himself from its passion and cultivating an all-knowing distance to prove that he's really on top of all this stuff is adolescent, too—and it limits him. In "Lust for Kicks," Ocasek's so busy piling up acidulous details about a hiply dècadent modern couple ("He's got his plastic sneakers/She's got her robuck purse") that the decadence never gets close enough to tell us anything. He doesn't get his hands dirty, and he should.

In "Let's Go" (the single, and the best cut on the LP), Ocasek's ambivalence about his material does work. The driving hook seems to pull the singer into the song almost against his will, and the tiny pause between "When she says" and "let's go" illuminates the whole com