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Rhino box sets resurrect the New Wave '80s

Ah, the '80s -- a time of conspicuous consumption, cheesy teen comedies, greed and some lethally bad hairdos. As the '90s begin to wane and the millenium hovers ever nearer, nostalgia for the "Me Decade" becomes more and more a part of current pop culture.

While there's no organized movement like the Seventies Preservation Society working to keep the plastic, fantastic '80s in our hearts, judging by the ever-multiplying amount of anthologies, greatest hits and box sets, it's safe to say that fond memories for the music of that decade have as long a life as unrecycled styrofoam.

Rhino Records, a company with fond memories of all kinds of music, is the closest thing to an '80s music preservation society that we have. Along with their extensive '70s hits and "frat-rock" collections, one of their most popular and in-depth anthology series is "Just Can't Get Enough: New Wave Hits of the '80s," now up to 15 volumes. Rhino is also famous for their intricate box sets, of which "The Cars Anthology: Just What I Needed" (HHHHH) is just one of the most recent. True to the Rhino tradition, both collections are beautifully packaged (especially the Cars box featuring hot-rod flames and a grille on sparkly purple plastic) and pack together a diverse collection of hits and rare tracks.

"Just What I Needed" does double-duty as a greatest hits package and a collection of rare and previously unreleased tracks. At 40 songs, the fact that "Just What I Needed" hangs together as well as it does is as much a tribute to the Cars' music as it is to the people who chose and sequenced the tracks for the box.

Disc One of "Just What I Needed" covers much of the group's first two albums -- their self-titled debut from 1978 and 1979's "Candy-O," on which the Cars' new wave/punk roots are prominent. Disc Two features the band's more mainstream middle and later years, stretching from 1980's "Panorama" to their final album "Door to Door," released in 1987.

The selections on "Just What I Needed" are uniformly entertaining. Hearing the band progress from the stripped-down new wave of "Just What I Needed," to the power-pop of "My Best Friend's Girl," to the synth-driven minimalism of "Good Times Roll" and "Moving In Stereo" in a matter of minutes shows just how underrated the group's musical range is.

This versatility helps explain the Cars' popularity with both fans of punk and new wave as well as fans of mainstream rock during the late '70s and early '80s. Even on songs as streamlined and synthesized as "Double Life," the songwriting is so tight that the group's artier tendencies embellish rather than depart from the pop format.

As the Cars grew more and more mainstream musically, those weird, off-kilter bits like the droning and burbling synthesizers on "You Might Think" and "Magic" refreshed their songwriting. And although they became a pop group in their later years, they aged gracefully: "Drive" and "Tonight She Comes" are two of the best examples of mid-'80s mainstream pop that you can find.

The odds and sods on "Just What I Needed," however, reveal the Cars as a great pop group with a knack for pushing the envelope. As out-there as they get (hint: there's a song called "The Little Black Egg") the band always lands with its feet securely on pop's terra firma.

The aforementioned "The Little Black Egg" sounds like a Martian take on the basic Buddy Holly guitar-jangle. "Funtime" shows the group's roots in David Bowie/Lou Reed-style minimalism, and an early version of "Nightspots" pays homage to Wire's robotic punk. The demos from the Cars' earliest days show that from the beginning, the group had the ballads ("Take Me Now") and the rockers ("Leave or Stay," "Slipaway") to conquer the charts and win a diverse and devoted fanbase.

That fan base includes the Pixies' Frank Black (who has cited the Cars as a major influence on his songwriting) and Weezer's Rivers Cuomo and Matt Sharp (whose Rentals share the same affinity for a cool keyboard that the Cars did back in the day). The band's influence can also be felt in the production work that Cars leader Ric Ocasek is currently involved in; he's twiddled knobs for Weezer and Mercury Rev among others. "Just What I Needed" is indeed necessary for anybody interested in the Cars' influential music.

As far as "Just Can't Get Enough: New Wave Hits of the '80s" ( HHHH) goes, if you still can't get enough of new wave after listening to the five latest volumes of the collection, get help. The 90 songs that comprise volumes 11-15 of this series ought to more than fulfill anyone's need for shiny pop tunes.

As with the other ten discs in the "Just Can't Get Enough" series, there's plenty of hits, near-hits and misses to keep your ears entertained. It's this variety that separates the Rhino collection from those sold-only-on-TV "Best of Totally Awesome '80s" skimpy two-disc collections. Not only can you reminisce to Big Country's "In a Big Country," Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" and Animotion's "Obsession," you can hear new wave oddities like Felony's "The Fanatic" and "Anywhere With You" by Rubber Rodeo for probably the first time.

"Just Can't Get Enough" catalogues the entire spectrum of bands that fall under the new wave heading. These bands include balladeers like Spandau Ballet, synth-pop groups like Yaz and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, girl groups like Bananarama and the Flirts, artsy groups like Echo and the Bunnymen and the Dream Academy, novelty acts like Murray Head ("One Night In Bangkok") and Paul Hardcastle ("19"), and relatively straight-ahead pop/rock acts like Squeeze, the Fixx and the Romantics. As big as this list is, it still doesn't contain all the different new wave mutations included in this massive and mostly consistent collection.

While this collection of '80s hits doesn't shine quite as brightly as some of the earlier volumes in the "Just Can't Get Enough" series, it certainly does sum up the end of the new wave era; after the mid-'80s, pop music and experimentalism went their separate ways -- the former straight to the top of the charts, the latter back to its natural habitat of college radio and underground record labels.