It's tempting to be sentimental and say that Move Like This, the first Cars album by all the living members of the band's classic lineup, suffers from the absence of Benjamin Orr, who died in 2000. But the truth is that c'mon, half the time you couldn't tell his voice from Ric Ocasek's voice to tell who was singing on the old classics, and throughout the album Orr's bandmates play a bass he once owned. Move Like This is short, slight and brisk, but that's true of all Cars albums -- they've never topped their 1978 self-titled debut, but that album is perfect because of how wonderfully slight and brisk it is, all hit singles and coulda-been singles, even its darkest deep cut custom built for an iconic teen flick scene. In an age when punk and new wave were seen as the edgy antidote to stadium rock, they were the band that was so well suited to bring new wave to AOR radio that nobody called them sellouts, because obviously they didn't have some other artistic impulse they were suppressing.

Coming so soon after the New Cars debacle, it's tempting to say Ocasek is merely proving he can do a pastiche of himself better than Todd Rundgren, but there's something to be said for the guy knowing his strengths. And he kept his crisp, economical sound alive in productions for Weezer and a host of other alt-rock radio bands well in the '90s and well into the new millenium, so Move Like This feels like a very mild ProTools era update of the Cars sound rather than an attempt at keeping up with the times or sticking stubbornly to familiar territory -- it says a lot that the self-produced tracks are sonically indistinguishable from the ones produced by modern rock hitmaker Jacknife Lee. There are occasionally moments that stick out initially -- "Keep On Knocking" features a "Rockin' In The Free World" soundalike riff with a sludgy distortion pedal tone, but it's not that much of a stretch. And I don't much care for "Soon"'s slow-mo power balladry, but then "Drive" was never my favorite of their '80s hits. For the most part, though, the album just proves that The Cars understand their own innate, timeless appeal better than anybody else.

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