The Cars Live - Musikladen 1979
This complete, live, television concert, recorded for the long-running  German pop music series Musikladen, captures the Cars in their late '70s  ascendancy, offering ample evidence of the young Boston quintet's rock-solid  performing skills and formidable instincts as writers and arrangers. Poised  between arena-rock bombast and punk aggression, the Cars were canny, concise  stylists who proudly unleashed hit singles in an album-dominated era, an  achievement that could mislead serious-minded rock aesthetes to assume the band  was a studio invention. In fact, their major-label deal arose only after the  band had honed its playing in Beantown clubs and cracked local airwaves with  self-produced prototypes of the songs that popped up on theirself-titled debut album.The 11 songs here tilt toward that collection, with a nod to itssequel, and all share the band's  shrewd synthesis of tightly crafted songs that explore a tension between  romantic yearning and neurotic anxiety. Principal songwriter Ric Ocasek swaps  vocal leads with bassist Ben Orr, establishing their familiar yin and yang, with  Ocasek mining neurosis while Orr plucks the heartstrings. David Robinson's  muscular, uncluttered drumming transcends its frequent use of electronic drums,  Greg Hawkes's keyboards deftly stretch the sci-fi possibilities of then- primitive synths, and not-so-secret weapon Elliot Easton, a southpaw guitarist,  tightens the clockwork interplay between his versatile lead guitar and Ocasek's  crisp rhythm work. If the band's choral work sounds thinner than on their  recordings, it's less an indictment of the band than a measurement of how far  producer Roy Thomas Baker carried the heavily layered vocal stamp he had refined  with the Cars' labelmates, Queen.The original program source confines the audio to a monaural mix, and the video  transfer suffers from some intermittent raster patterns. Such artifacts are  minor handicaps given the caliber of the performance.--Sam Sutherland