Beaches, convertibles, MTV showing real videos. Think Andy Warhol flash-cutting grainy images to "Hello Again." Watch Ric Ocasek walk on water during "Magic." Think of cruising to "You Might Think." And remain in awe of the late Ben Orr's best vocal since the debut, on the groundbreaking smash ballad, "Drive."

That's what makes The Cars' final great album, "Heartbeat City," their most consistent album since that perfect first disc. It marked a creative highwater level in the band's evolution, mixing in the best of their Buddy Holly pop with their "Panorama" darkness. It also moved away from their Roy Thomas Baker sterile sheen to "Mutt" Lange's polished pop glow (he who made Def Leppard both shattering and melodic) and fed it to the masses as fantastic cotton candy summer tunes. Place this record next to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," Huey Lewis' "Sports," ZZ Top's "Eliminator," Van Halen's "1984" and Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell," and you had the party records that stuck in your memory for that year.

"Heartbeat City" still holds fast to its best moments. It gave The Cars' their biggest seller to that date, and their highest charting single. But it also gave them one of the most haunting songs in their canon, with the mysterious title track. Vaguely hinting at what almost sounds like a drug addiction, the enigmatic Jacki has "happy days we count on thumbs." The domicile of "Heartbeat City" is both an alluring and distant place, and Ocasek mutters "it's my life" as the song fades away. Oddly enough, that song bids goodbye to The Car's last decent album; I am sure there aren't too many folks with ecstatic summer memories of "Door To Door."

Which also begs the question; this was a major seller from a band that had consistent platinum plus successes. Why are their no remastered Cars albums other than the debut? An album this great really deserves better than the old, flat original CD transfer. An upgrade is due, and soon, please!

When The Cars entered the music scene they were part of the New Wave music that would become the dominant music of the 80s. However, as happens with many variations on a theme, New Wave became the New Pop as pop music realigned itself with New Wave influence. As the 80s drew to a close, new wave began to sound like old hat, and a little dated as the newness wore off the no longer novel sound of synthesizers imitating a host of instruments with occasional sound effects.

"Heartbeat City" was released in 1984 as pop was starting to realign itself to the influence of New Wave. Change is not accepted well by many people, and thus this CD (read "album" as in vinyl album at the time) was not well-received by some of The Cars earliest fans, who saw it as more pop than New Wave. However, if you take this CD and pretend it was released in 1980, it would not have been considered pop and would have been another then sort of counter-culture album.

So when you read reviews, consider whether the writer is being objective regarding the CD or whether they are expressing their opinion of how the CD was received by the public at the time. If you are a rebel in any era, the last thing you want to hear is that one of your icons was accepted by "The Establishment".

Forgetting the context of when the album was released, this album is classic New Wave 80s music. Several of the songs are instantly recognizable as pop classics that will forever be among the greatest pop songs ever recorded, albeit with the 80s New Wave flavor.

Probably the three most readily recognizable of the songs are "Drive", which would be a great song in any era, "Magic", which also has a truly great video to go with it, and "You Might Think".

As you move away from these well-known songs, the other songs are classic Cars, with Ric Ocasek's voice often taking the lead vocal. Among the remaining songs, I especially like "It's Not the Night", a song about a couple where one of the two is getting ready to break up, but the other one doesn't really want it to happen. Two great points about this song: first, the word love is not used once; second, the song doesn't mention "he" or "she" even once, thus the song could be about either.

"Why Can't I have You" is another excellent song. Lush vocals including an excellent harmony fully explore the unusually evocative lyrics. Check out a couple of lines from the song:

"glossy mouth taste untamed moving"
"your eyes like mica lethal pout hinting"

Lyrics like this do not come in teen pop passages. This music is very serious, with some of the best lyrics by any rock group.

Enough details. The rest of the album is Cars. Heavy beats. Cool lyrics. Lots of keyboards (it WAS the 80s!). But the guitars and drums make themselves known. This album represents 80s music at its peak, and was a harbinger of New Wave becoming pop and pop becoming New Wave. The music is a little dated. It is generally instantly recognizable as 80s music. But that is as it should be. After all, isn't a lot of music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s readily recognizable as being from that era? That means that this album is being recognized as one of the great representative albums from its era.

Great rock is great forever. As it ages, sometimes it is reinterpreted in the contect of now, but, as with fine wines, age usually enhances our ability to understand what we heard then. Go back in time to an era when rock music was trying to find a new direction and listen to a great album by a group that helped rock music to find its new direction.

This "audiophile" CD is amazingly full of errors- the original flow of the album, as intended by producer Robert John Mutt Lange and the Cars has been ruined by sloppy mastering. On the original vinyl, cassette, and CD, the songs went one right after another with no gaps. In this version, the mastering engineer, Steve Hoffman, decided to put gaps between the tracks, making this "Heartbeat City by Steve Hoffman featuring the Cars". Also, this disc is labeled as an "HDCD", which stands for high definition CD. Some higher-end players can play these discs back with a little clearer sound. Well this disc is semi-HDCD, as during playback the HDCD light on my Denon 3910 went out near the end of several songs, sometimes adding an audible click. I also tried my friend's Oppo, and it did the same. As for the packaging, the lyrics came with the original versions, but missing on this one. Not very good quality control.

1984's Heartbeat City is the Cars most commercially successful album. Featuring the hits "Hello Again", "You Might Think", "Drive", "Heartbeat City", and "Magic" is one of the Cars finest albums, second only to their debut album. To bad the Cars only lasted for one more album after this one.

5 stars for the album.
5 stars for the sound quality
1 star for the HDCD glitch and missing segues between songs
2 stars for the artwork which is missing the lyrics.
-Average of 3 stars.
***

A classic album "Heartbeat City" may or may not be the best album the Cars released but one thing for certain it's the most controversial reissue in recent memory. Steve Hoffman remastered this CD from the original master tapes and the result is stunning if also stunningly frustrating for many fans; the album has better detail and a terrific, wide dynamic range BUT the original album had all the tracks with running into each other with minimal gaps. Hoffman's version of the album, however, doesn't. The songs fade out and have the gaps you would traditionally expect between the tracks.

Three additional problems have cropped up one with the HDCD encoding. Evidently the HDCD encoding is flawed--with the CD shifting out of HDCD mode unexpectedly as the volume goes down on a track. That won't be a problem IF you don't have an HDCD player.

The next issue is that if you rip this CD to your iPod (perhaps due to the encoding error)the tracks are missing small sections of the music. I haven't ripped my edition to my iPod yet but others have and have had problems.

The final problem is a simple one that Audio Fidelity immediately addressed; evidently the CDs were shipped without the lyrics (the original album had the lyrics on the sleeve that held the vinyl record). There have also been some complaints that the scan of the artwork is a bit shoddy but I that wasn't an issue on my copy. Audio Fidelity will be shipping out a lyric booklet to those who purchsed this CD just contact them at their website or call them.

So why three stars? The album deserved four or five stars originally (depending on whether or not you feel it was The Cars best album. For me the debut and "Panorama" were my favorites). Hoffman's wonderfully detailed, warm remaster sounds good but this CD has a number of flaws which prevent me from giving it five stars. The flaws bring this Audio Fidelity edition down to three stars. Is it an essential album? Absolutely. Does this sound better than the Target or regular version of the CD? Yes but IT IS severely flawed and you should be aware of the shortcomings of this CD before you order it. If you don't have an HDCD player you won't notice the problems I mentioned and you may or may not have the issues with your iPod just be ware of what I mentioned.