Blog Posts by David Fricke

'This is not a reunion - it's more like a conjunction." That is how singer-guitarist-songwriter Ric Ocasek of the Cars describes Move Like This, the New Wave band's first studio album in 24 years. "I never thought I'd make another Cars record," he claims, citing "the past, personalities and Ben's passing away" - the death in 2000 of bassist-singer Benjamin Orr.

Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: 'The Cars' by The Cars

But a year ago, Ocasek - a producer and periodic solo artist - found himself with new songs, "a lot of which I liked," he says. "It dawned on me: 'What if I called the guys? They'll do the best job, because they already know the whole thing.'"

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

To be released on May 10th by Hear Music, Move Like This was recorded last year in Los Angeles and upstate New York by the entire surviving band: Ocasek, drummer

New York's Webster Hall was a room full of mirrors - reflections bouncing from present to past and back - during the February 8th show by the British agit-rock band Gang of Four. Early in the set, singer Jon King recalled being there when the venue was called the Ritz - three decades ago. There was also the eerily identical resonance of the rallying choruses and aggro-dance relief in the band's reignitions of the 1979 single "At Home He's a Tourist" and the metallic '81 goosestep "To Hell With Poverty": howling broadsides against unchecked greed, suffocating conservatism and narcotic pop culture. In King's chanted provocations - from the blunt helplessness of "Not Great Men" on Gang of Four's master argument, 1979's Entertainment!, to the furious entrapment in "Do as I Say" from  the group's new album, Content (Yep Roc) - little had changed, except for the worse.

In the music, little has changed, because it is unnecessary. Gang Of Four reconvened, with all founding members, in 2005.

I came late to Before Today (4 A.D.) ­- the grand-pop blowout by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, all over 2010's best-of lists - with good reason: the self-conscious indie-loner eccentricities and lo-fi bric-a-brac on the leader's previous records. But Before Today has stayed in heavy rotation for a great reason: track two. And it's a cover.

"Bright Lit Blue Skies" was composed by singer-bassist Ronn Campisi of the Boston mid-Sixties quartet the Rockin' Ramrods and originally issued by that band (as the Ramrods) on the Plymouth label in the summer of 1966. The single was a perfect nugget of its time - aspiring-Beatles ingenuity with a Byrds-style twelve-string-guitar lick and long, sighing vocal harmonies. The song was a regional smash too, going Top 20 that August on WBZ in Boston, then resurfacing during the first garage-rock revival, on an early-Eighties LP, Bay State Rock Vol. 1: The Sixties (Star-Rhythm). "Bright Lit Blue Skies" is now on iTunes with other Ramrods A- and B-sides,