On June 13, 1979 The Cars released Candy-O, the follow-up to their self-titled platinum debut. With Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker at the controls, the Boston band delivered another quirky set of new wave tunes including "Let's Go", the first song by The Cars to hit the U.S. Top 20.
The entire album has a fresh feel and a sexy cover courtesy of pin-up artist Alberto Vargas. It's paced faster than the debut even if the songs aren't quite as good. (There's probably a good lesson in here by the way for rock bands.) I liked it at the time but I was also beginning to have my doubts about the band. Friends told me their New Haven concert wasn’t any good.
Most critics heaped praise with some reservations. The album did not score a place on 1979's Pazz and Jop Critics Poll, despite Robert Christgau of the Village Voice grading the album a B+:
Hooks are mechanical by nature, but the affectlessness of these deserves special mention; only listeners who consider "alienation is the craze" a great insight will find much meaning here. On the other hand, only listeners who demand meaning in all things will find this useless. Cold and thin, shiny and hypnotic, it's what they do best -- rock and roll that is definitively pop without a hint of cuteness. Which means that for them "alienation is the craze" may be a meaningful statement after all.
Tom Carson of Rolling Stone found fault in the album's sound:
It's almost inevitable that Candy-O, the Cars' second album, doesn't seem nearly as exciting as their first. The element of surprise is gone, and the band hasn't been able to come up with anything new to replace it. Candy-O is an elaborately constructed, lively, entertaining LP that's packed with good things. And it's got a wonderful title. But it's a little too disciplined, a shade too predictable. You never get the idea that these guys are going out on a limb, reaching for something dramatically beyond the safe borders of their proven 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 remotely threatens to turn into a great one.
If anything, the Cars are even more facile musically than they were before, but that same facility makes Candy-O sound like glib product too much of the time. It doesn't feel urgent the way the first record did. On The Cars, the group found a perfect middle ground between the New Wave's revisionist spirit and the mass audience's growing conservatism. These guys didn't catch the spirit of the time so much as perform a neat balancing act between its contradictions. Wit and epic exuberance, not artsy trappings, made the Cars special, and they haven't given us nearly enough of those qualities here. What the band doesn't seem to realize is that all that tight-assed posturing is trite and ultimately tiresome. Rick Ocasek + Company are a more interesting, less gimmicky group in almost every way than Cheap Trick, but they've never done anything as humanly moving as "Surrender."
I don't dislike Candy-O -- after all, it sounds better than practically anything else on the radio -- and I still like the Cars. They're a good band. Their virtue is they're never anything less than that. Their limitation is they've yet to prove they're anything more.
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