Thinking I can review this without even listening to it.
When you're 12 - 13 years old, you don't have much money, so any album you buy is going to need to be really really good. Imagine spending a month's salary on something like an April Wine album because you like the one song they play on the radio. It's a big investment for a little kid. Record store guys were no help either, they kind of just wanted you out of the store and knew you could only buy one album. So they'll recommend it just to get the transaction over with. Once you get it home, the album has the song you like and 8 or 9 other COMPLETE DOGS! One's only recourse was to tell all your friends not to buy it themselves, at the risk of embarrassing yourself.
This happens often enough, and you start to recognize from a cover alone (sometimes, this is not foolproof) whether or not the disc is going to come home with you. For a 13 year old, that Cars cover looks very promising. And the songs of their's that you have heard were strikingly new-sounding. Enough New Wave to stand out, enough guitar to not leave the well-tread rock 'n' roll path (reducing your risk!).
Beginning to end, The Cars did not disappoint me. Every song killed. No dogs at all. And, they flowed, one into the next. I'm pretty sure I have this memorized - every drum fill, every guitar solo, every synth line, every word. The type of album I would come back to time and time again. And it worked so well because my tastes weren't all that sophisticated back then (are they now?), and this was music that, as I said, rode the edge of novel without being overly alienating.
I'd give this 5 for Elliot Easton alone. But everyone else is equally (almost) as adept. Greg Hawkes' keyboards and Ric Ocasek's vocals season the rock undercarriage with an oddness that is appealing to a gawky teenager. I might not be this effusive if I never heard The Cars before, but it has been one of my ten favorite albums since it came out, and after listening to thousands of others, this still stands up.
