Door to Door (The Cars, 1987)

Door to Door is probably the weakest album of the Cars' discography, the afterthought of a two-peaked band history. Right out the gates, the Cars enjoyed great success in the late 1970's with their self-titled debut and its successor, Candy-O. The next two albums didn't fare so well, though "Shake It Up" was one of their best-known songs. For Heartbeat City, they changed producers and sound to embrace a much more synth-pop oriented approach that yielded a number of big hits. Things crested with the single "Tonight She Comes" (the Cars had a gift for the double-entendre) in which an album's worth of production was poured into a single song to support their first greatest-hits package.

Sporting a sound far removed from their early days, the Cars were experiencing a full-blown crisis of consciousness over their identity by 1987. Songs like "You Might Think" had been pretty much unthinkable in their earlier, scrappier days. Hence Door to Door sports of more "live" sound than Heartbeat City, but the approach is uneven and some songs come off overly slick ("Fine Line") or rough ("Double Trouble" and the title track). One consistent feature is the band sounds beat down and bored much of the time. It was no surprise to anybody that the band broke up shortly afterward. A Cars reunion seems difficult as the 1990's wore on, with the band split between the enthusiastic (Easton and Hawkes), the pessimistic (Robinson and Orr), and Ric Ocasek's burgeoning career as a producer. When Benjamin Orr passed away in 2000, difficult seems to trend toward impossible even though a "New Cars" largely fueled by Easton did the rounds. Finally, an Orr-less Cars released one of the most unlikely of solo albums, Move Like This, in 2011. The next day there were reports of unusual cold weather in the underworld.

Oddly enough this was the second Cars album I bought. I was just a teenager and my parents liked to scrutinize my purchases so I was prudish about albums with hot women on the cover, hence I angled toward albums like Panorama and this one rather than their better albums.