The Cars - Shake It Up

By 1981 The Cars had released four albums in four years. When they dropped Shake It Up late in '81 the band suddenly had a top 10 hit with "Shake It Up" an infectious earworm that contained yet another brilliant Elliot Easton guitar solo. While the other singles from the album that dropped throughout 1982 didn't get as much traction the album still went double platinum and the song "Since You're Gone" is one of my favourite songs by the band ... ever.

Roy Thomas Baker was again in the producer's chair and with Shake It Up the band crafted a collection of tightly packed new wave pop songs. It was more of the same, but different - but not as different as the songs on the previous album Panorama. It's always fun reading old reviews, and apparently the reviewer (Alan Niester) with the Globe and Mail back in '81 wrote. "Ric Ocasek and the boys have produced an understated and decidedly underwhelming package that makes no attempt to deviate from their patented, semi-robotic pop." I'd argue he missed the point as that was the point of The Cars - they wrote semi-robotic pop that was grafted onto an organic exoskeleton, and the results were often spectacular.

The album opens with the haunting "Since You're Gone." I've already expressed my love for this one. Elliot Easton's use of an Ebow to get the infinite sustain on the solo is inspired and adds another layer to an already intricate song. This is followed by "Shake It Up" a wonderfully quirky song that was a hit for a reason - it's really good. This one two combination sets the tone for the album.

Admittedly, the rest of the album sort of pales by comparison ... but that's only if you're trying to measure one thing against another. Shake It Up wasn't an album I had back in the day, so many of the songs here are new to me. I have to admit I did a bit of a double take when "I'm Not The One" came on. It's a song that sounds like it could have come from Ric's 1986 solo album The Side of Paradise.

I get a kick out of reading up on old albums there's generally something new to learn and some odd bit of trivia I didn't know. For example I didn't know there were four singles pulled from the album. Two I knew about, "Shake It Up" and "Since You're Gone" which are great songs. The other two were perplexing. A room full of smart people pulled "Victim of Love" and "Think it Over" - two decent album tracks, but not single material (I don't think I ever heard them on the radio), while totally ignoring "This Could Be Love" that featured Benjamin Orr on vocals. It's a great song.

I've really enjoyed spending time with some of The Cars earlier albums (I'm still missing one). I always liked the sparkly singles and while I considered myself a fan I also found myself only able to listen to so many songs in a row before suffering from ear fatigue. So it's been an interesting revelation digging in deep and letting things breathe. There's really only one song that feels out of place here. The closing track "Maybe Baby" feels like an unfinished demo - I can't put my finger on it, but it's almost jarring in how out of place it feels here.

Shake It Up covers a lot more ground than you'd think while retaining the quirkiness that was the hallmark of the band. Yeah, at a superficial level it would be easy to give this a casual listen and pass judgment - heck I do it all the time. There was some truth in Mr. Niester's review, one can view this as simply more patented, semi-robotic pop. To actually take the time to intentionally listen to an album takes ... time, and frankly being able to do so takes effort. It's no wonder we tend to listen to music the way a crow looks for shiny things. We want the instant gratification that brings, and having to sit and pay attention doesn't always yield results. Shake It Up was a tasty cocktail that took the band's formula and stirred it up (oh I'm proud of that one).

I've been genuinely surprised at how much I've enjoyed this one, and in the process I got to make slight adjustments to old memories by shaking things up.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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