10 Perfect Power Pop Albums With No Bad Songs
3. The Cars - The Cars
One of the biggest catches that comes with power pop is that you tend to fall on one side of the spectrum a little bit too much. When you have to balance the pop side of your sound with rock, you can only go so far before you end up going into full on pop music. In the case of the Cars though, they were never ashamed to show just how polished they could be.
Produced by the legendary Roy Thomas Baker, the Cars' debut album sounds like what Queen would have done had they decided to go for pure pop in their glory years. Being a lot more polished than the rest of the rock scene at the time, Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr have amazing chemistry as vocalists, with the same old teenage romance lyrics that got people hooked on this style of music in the first place.
That's not even a bad thing in this case. Though the topics in these songs might be a little bit tried and true for the genre, these are guys that understand that cliches work sometimes, and if you sell it well enough, you can become one of the biggest names in the world. Although the band would eventually make some amazing music after this album, no other record was going to boast such a strong lineup of classics. For all intents and purposes, this is basically the Cars' greatest hits album before they even had any other material out.