Ric Ocasek
This Side Of Paradise

Silent glances and fingers widening the space between the blinds of a large window in an apartment of a New York skyscraper. That's how "Keep On Laughing" and "This Side Of Paradise" begin. In other words, the track and the album closest to "Heartbeat City" (song and album). All the elements that make this piece similar to the more famous 1984 piece are "sacrificed" on the altar of a (very dignified) easy listening in the form of a beautiful pop-rock song that doesn't get tiring, with an excellent balance of guitars and "clear" keyboards, contrary to the dull (and not very melodic) ones of that "Door To Door" by the Cars the following year.

Just listen to the intro of "True To You" to realize how crystalline they sound. In this track it's always very late, but the night is also and above all for having fun. Ocasek, who has never sung as well as on this album, plays with a buttery bass (just like in '84) that chases after him. The Bad Seeds and Nick Cave owe a lot to Ric and this song, whose video clip shows Ocasek afflicting their posters through the streets of New York, when the aforementioned kangaroos were almost unknown in the USA.

"Emotion In Motion," with Roland Orzabal on guitar, is a very sweet ballad, stuff for gnomes and fairies. The piece, certainly not the strongest but best highlighting Ric's melodic skills and compositional ease, will be a great success around the planet. Two years after "Heartbeat City" this gentleman is a true rock star, dressed in sequins, two-tone '30s shoes, dancing in his live performances while leaving (or almost) his guitar. The guy, to put it in the words of Offlaga Disco Pax, has the face of an ass, so who cares if a two-meter skeleton like him becomes a rockstar?

"Look In Your Eyes" is an entire catalog of '80s sounds put into a "demonstrative" song. Yet the result, in a track with little melody and very fast, with a fairly unvaried vocal line, is mature and well achieved, thanks to the nice solo and the great guitar lines, as well as to this restless drum without cymbals. In short: it's 1986, all right, but the artist is one with guts, he is neither one of the Erasure nor Pia Zadora. He's not Samantha Fox nor the lead singer of Missing Persons. There’s a way and a way to use keyboards... Even in the '80s. "Coming For You" is his spoken word song, minimalist to the bone (like him), with an indecipherable meaning, featuring a series of blazing guitar parts and a sad fading of metropolitan jazz, which closes the side A.

Side B starts again in a moderately good mood with "Mystery," over a playful bass that enjoys listening to a chant of water droplets that fall in the same way. We have moved to Japan, a land of minimalism, and it is felt in some keyboard parts, even in the chorus. A delightful ballad for Ric who feels "still the same, lost like tears in the rain." It's precisely all of Ric's taste that emerges in this work of his, not just what led him to create "Heartbeat City." In the next "True Love" there are the sounds of music from bridal shop commercials (those "velvety" and fluted keyboards), a solemn trumpet-synthesizer in the chorus, and nothing less than a languid Spanish guitar for this "slow number". "P.F.J. (Pink Flag Joe)" is a highly successful divertissement with guitars played by Monsieur Tom Verlaine, a sign of how much among post-punk Americans, ex-new wavers Americans, American minimal artists of that era, and cult American artists of today, they are "all one family."

Does it need explaining that "Hello Darkness" is another specimen of night rock? Guitars that, like throughout the album, play more but break less; bass that travels relentlessly, percussion/bumps/crashes of dressers falling from the balcony/noise of a metropolis that lives to the fullest... "Hello".

The final Titletrack sees, on a synthetic, velvety but rhythmic sonic carpet, Ocasek in a low tone, that of a "contemplator" (the playful almost always raises the tone in this album strangely and happily without choking). The track grows slowly, just like the wall of sound, first thanks to a thunderous drum, then to a guitar that has a fast riff and a sound (but not volume) almost trash. There remains only the final chime, spinning, a green ballerina with E.T.'s face stuck in a pink tutu, balancing on the tip of her left paw. The record fades out definitively with a couple of minutes of the instrumental version of "True Love": again those keyboards heard in the commercials of bridal shops... A very classy result (although some sounds undoubtedly age faster and worse than others).

If "Heartbeat City" was the overview of Ocasek's new imaginative obsessions, in "This Side Of Paradise" one does not view the City from a private jet, rather one immerses oneself, enters the venues, walks the streets, sometimes goes up into the apartments, and sometimes drives around in a car. Less suggestive, but clearer. The album, an additional gem, goes down in American discography history for having required a whopping 279 days of studio recording, re-recordings, and remixes... All to achieve the perfect sound for Ocasek, immediately impactful but not "toyish", keyboard-driven but with a well-erected wall of sound (contrary to almost all synth pop production of the era), as well as guitar-driven enough to emphasize that he, anyway, is always the leader of a rock band. All of this, meaning this album and its idiosyncrasies, to highlight that, if Tom Verlaine was the decadent hero of the 80s Americans and Alan Vega the True American Hero (or the anti-hero), Ric Ocasek was the romantic hero of USA pop-rock, the symbol of a playful and/or fashionable easy listening, but not (and never) trivial, and he has nothing to hide. Nor to reproach himself if he achieved great commercial success.