The Cars - Heartbeat City (Hybrid SACD, Ultradisc UHR)
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Ric Ocasek – vocals, guitar
Ben Orr – vocals, bass
Elliot Easton – guitar, vocals
Greg Hawkes – keyboards, vocals, Fairlight CMI programming
David Robinson – drums, Fairlight programming
Andy Topeka – Fairlight CMI programming
1 Hybrid SACD, Ultradisc UHR
Limited numbered edition
Stereo
Studio
Label : MOFI
Original Label : Elektra
Recorded July 1983 – January 1984 at Battery Studios, London
Engineered by Mike Shipley
Produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange, The Cars
Remastered by Krieg Wunderlich
Originally released in 1984
Reissued in 2016
Tracks:
- Hello Again
- Looking for Love
- Magic
- Drive
- Stranger Eyes
- You Might Think
- Its Not the Night
- Why Cant I Have You
- I Refuse
- Heartbeat City
Reviews :
"Coming off the less-than-classic Shake It Up, the Cars decided again to change things up, this time moving from their home studio in Boston to London to record with Mutt Lange. The producer was coming off a string of sleek modern hits, most recently Def Leppard's Pyromania, and the Cars put themselves in Lange's capable and demanding hands. They spent six months in the studio painstakingly putting the album together, sometimes spending days getting the right bass sound or vocal take. The bandmembers were rarely in the room at the same time and instead of using live drums on the record, Lange and David Robinson put together drum tracks using samples of Robinson's playing. This sounds a bit like the recipe for a airless, stale album, but much like Pyromania, Heartbeat City is a gleaming pop masterpiece. The producer's golden touch, the strength of the songs Ric Ocasek wrote, and the stunning vocal performance both he and Benjamin Orr deliver make the album one of the best of the '80s and something that still sounds perfect many years later. It's a near-total reboot of the Cars' sound, giving them a thoroughly modern upgrade while still retaining enough of the DNA from their early hits to keep it a Cars album. Songs like "You Might Think" and "Magic" have the power chords and chugging rhythms, "It's Not the Night" has the dramatic emotion, and "Looking for Love" has some chirpy new wave in the verses, but most of the album takes the band to new places. "Hello Again" is arena-sized modern rock with some very Def Lep backing vocals -- something that pops up on almost every song -- and "Drive" is a timelessly romantic ballad that perfects the MOR sound that the previous album hinted at. The title track is moody soft pop with smooth synth pads and a crooning vocal by Ocasek, "Stranger Eyes" is basically a mash-up of Def Lep and the Cars with the addition of a few wonderfully corny synth sound effects, and "It's Not the Night" is pure AOR balladry that sounds like it could have been on Foreigner 4, another record Lange produced. Overall, Heartbeat City is a masterful example of how a band can reinvent itself without losing what made it great in the first place. Credit Lange's production savvy, Ocasek's songwriting genius, or the band's dedication to adding just what each song needed; when you combine them all it makes for brilliant pop and one of the landmark albums of the era." AllMusic Review by Tim Sendra
Ultra High-Resolution (UHR) is a dual-layer hybrid SACD recorded with Direct Stream Digital Technology at a sampling rate of 11.2 MHZ and a frequency response of DC to 100KHz. In addition, a high-precision down-conversion is utilized for the CD layer (16bit/44.1kHz) to preserve the sonic integrity of the original DSD capture. The result: State-of-the-art sound on any machine that can play either standard compact discs or SACDs.
Ratings :
AllMusic : 5 / 5 , Discogs : 4,07 / 5