Audio By Carbonatix
Who doesn’t want to root for the solo outing of rock’s deadpan ghoul of ’80s cool? Nexterday‘s opening track, “Crackpot,” with its pelvic, ground-down guitar and Ocasek’s trademark throat-caught strut, sounds damn near sexy, even with a respirator for its backing track. Sadly, that anthemic potential evaporates quickly and quietly. Former Cars frontman Ocasek seems trapped in an awkward molt, trying to transition from keyboard-inflected rock and roll into something much more electronically cluttered and emotionally vacant. The drum machines sound like sneezing fleas, and one dreadfully grunge-sponged guitar riff gets recycled several times, sometimes injected in spray-cheese piles onto the parched pop backdrops. Ultimately, it sounds like a Cars record absent crucial players, with plenty of room for tumbleweeds to whistle through the painfully empty spaces. Ocasek himself sounds hospital-bed exhausted, and because he hasn’t thoroughly absorbed anything new or reinvented the kind of sound he once penned effortlessly, one can’t help but hear Nexterday as a shadow of scraps from the Candy-O cutting-room floor mixed with the rhythm settings that come with every cheap keyboard.
