The Cars – First Avenue (Minneapolis, MN) – Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Stones jokes notwithstanding, has there ever been a better way to age than in the context of rock ‘n’ roll? If it’s done right, and The Cars seem to be doing it right enough, you can stay, if not young, pure energy forever, nearly invisible behind a screen of abstract musical cool. At First Avenue a month ago, I spent an evening wondering where best to latch on to these four, formerly five, men called The Cars, where to find that glimmer that might turn into deep personal investment. Ric Ocasek, strange and tall and badly dressed but somehow singing songs of universal girl-longing, would have provided that glimmer, but my search was in vain, to wit: It’s about the music, man.

Did I arrive misinformed? I thought people liked The Cars for their relatable lyrical sentiments, but what the audience responded to most was not the sentiments but the sounds (it should always be so, and is, more often than not). Only guitarist Elliot Easton broke the wall and seemed to be playing directly to the audience (though Ocasek let loose a few smiles later on, pleased by what was transpiring), and he got the biggest cheer of the night after nailing the central lick of “Just What I Needed.” The audience sang along for the chorus, perhaps too embarrassed to also imitate Easton’s zippy notes with impassioned vocalizations, though we all know that would be the more satisfying interface.

The Cars might be the least rhythmic pop band of all time (though no insult intended for straight time David Robinson, he of the Ringo school of drumming), and yet they move ever forward as relentlessly as the best of Kraftwerk. The new material from locomotive Move Like This proved most monstrous of all, vaguely psychedelic in its loudness and factory-assembled from unsurprising chords, but somehow these new songs did not indicate artistic exhaustion but, in their uniformity, obsession and persistence. Which is not to say they are especially good songs, only that they are what they are, and consistently so.

The best music of the night came before The Cars began, a bit of Bad Brains’ Ocasek-produced Rock for Light (the inferior but undeniably muscular upgrade from their early, beautifully shoddy recordings) blaring softly through the PA. The Cars couldn’t top that, but it served as a nice preliminary reminder of Ocasek’s secondary role as professor of sound. His own band’s guitar/synth monoliths best the pop music inheritors of today, not in their intricacy but in their patient wash.

Note: One attendee remarked that The Cars played better at First Avenue than they did when last seen in the 1980s. That seems to be the trend this century; it must be that older bands are simply more aware of the final word.