Like AC/DC before and Def Leppard after, the Cars found their greatest fortune with Mutt Lange, scourge of human drummers. Recorded over a six-month period, 1984’s Heartbeat City nearly doubled the band’s total of Top 40 hits. Then came the requisite tour, and then the solo records: Elliot Easton’s Change No Change, Benjamin Orr’s The Lace, and Ric Ocasek’s second effort This Side Of Paradise. Orr and Ocasek each sent a single into the Top 30, but their success didn’t much carry over for the reconvened Cars. Door To Door’s “You Are the Girl” was valedictory treacle and therefore rewarded appropriately, but that was about it. Ocasek had a decent production record to this point — helming releases by Bad Brains, Suicide, and Romeo Void — but, oddly, his sole co-production credit on a Cars record marked their commercial nadir. The band split the next year, and each man went his own way. However, their laconic, poised catalog endured. Orr died in 2000; a few years later, Easton and keyboardist Greg Hawkes formed the New Cars with Todd Rundgren singing lead. Both events affected Ocasek at differing depths, but when he found himself with a batch of new tunes that recalled the Cars, he called his bandmates to flesh them out. The classic formula didn’t produce another pop smash, but Move Like This abounds with the weird energy that powered the Cars’ time as the goofiest-looking motherfuckers in pop.