1-0 Reviews
Can
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Links:
Official Can/Spoon Records Homepage
Title says it all CZUKAY Can bassist's personal homepage Can -- Godfathers of Indie Perfect Sound Forever's article |
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Albums: |
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Links:
Official Can/Spoon Records Homepage
Title says it all CZUKAY Can bassist's personal homepage Can -- Godfathers of Indie Perfect Sound Forever's article |
Tago Mago1971 |
Group's first album with singer Damo Suzuki.
Can was a German band, begun in the late 60s, specializing in impressionistic, rhythmic soundscapes. The band would record music for hours on end, editing fragments and pieces to form fully realized songs. This album was originally released as a double record set, and highlights the various strengths of the band (odd, spacey sound effects, James Brown-influenced funk vamps, free-form, free-language prose of Suzuki).
Representative tracks
Halleluwah: 18-minute excursion into a psychedelic, hyper-rhythmic dreamworld. Music is a tribal "Sex Machine" filtered through early, experimental Pink Floyd. Trance inducing.
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Personnel:
Irmin Schmidt:
Holger Czukay:
Michael Karoli:
Jaki Leibezeit:
Kenji "Damo" Suzuki: |
Ege Bamyasi1972 |
Album finds the band shortening their songs and honing their unique brand of ambient avant-funk.
The extended synthesizer freakouts are almost gone, and the band tightens up its sound. More emphasis is placed on pure groove and pulse on this album and it, in general, is a much more approachable album than its predecessors. Drummer Jaki Leibezeit demonstrates his mastery of metronomic, James Brown-influenced funk patterns. Experimental dance music.
Representative tracks
One More Night: Odd-metered, metronomic, dance groove. Trance-inducing repetition was used by the band to great effect on a number of their releases. Imagine a funky, minimalistic Philip Glass, or an acoustic Chemical Brothers.
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Personnel:
Schmidt, Czukay, Karoli, Leibezeit, Suzuki |
Future Days1973 |
Album wherein the band begins to "soften" its sound a little. The emphasis is still on trance-grooves, but with a more impressionistic bent.
Although some of the songs are long (one is 20 minutes), the band plays extremely efficiently. The music on this album is a forerunner to some of the more danceable New Age music today. Artists such as Stereolab, the Orb, and Bjork owe a lot to this sound.
Representative tracks
Future Days: Title track sounds like Debussy meeting James Brown. Surprisingly, it works very well, and the band practically invents psychedelic dance music on the track. Very breezy, and Suzuki sings his most accessibly.
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Personnel:
Schmidt, Karoli, Czukay, Leibezeit, Suzuki |
Soon Over Babaluma1974 |
Can's first album after the departure of vocalist-supreme Damo Suzuki finds them at the top of their game. For those unfamiliar with the band, it's almost impossible to imagine exactly what they sound like. Rhythm is at the heart of everything they do. In a way, Can anticipated the World Music boom of the 80s by succumbing to the polyrhythms and primal, heartbeat pulse of African and South American drumming styles. Of course, there is a fair amount of James Brown in the mix as well.
Texturally, the band were masters. Here, keyboards color every track with a kind of rootless waterstroke. Earlier in their career, the band had ventured into psychedelicism and trippy washouts, but here they are focused geniuses. Karoli's guitar is one half Velvet Underground and the other half alien melody seeker.
Representative tracks
Dizzy Dizzy: Ska/reggae-influenced track, featuring violin, and odd, fractured-English vocals. No note is wasted, as the band has achieved an unbelievably efficient compositional and performance ethic.
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Personnel:
Schmidt, Karoli, Czukay, Leibezeit |
Unlimited Edition1976 |
Unreleased and other oddities from 1969-75.
Whereas you might steer clear of musical 'leftovers' from anyone else (Fab 4 Anthologies anyone?), Can were (predictably) the exception. If you've made it this far into the discography, it's doubtful that the band's near-perfect track record from the outset has gone unnoticed. It only stands to reason that their outtakes would be pretty good. This collection spans their classic period, and highlights the band's known strengths (rhythm, synth textures, group improv), as well as a few surprises (collage music, ethnic interests, humor). Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the music is that it just doesn't really sound like outtakes. The concepts are fresh, relative to the other albums, and the band never sounds without direction. Most of the songs blend into each other, and the quality of sound is immaculate. Even Damo Suzuki and Malcolm Mooney start to sound in sync. No, it doesn't have the flow of Ege or Soon Over Babaluma, but impressive, fun, and always unpredictable nonetheless.
Representative tracksGomorrha: Leadoff track, from 1973, is a perfect slice of the dreamy ambience found on Future Days. No real beat, but pulse aplenty, with so much gooey harmonic watercoloring. To think that the band had this kind of stuff in the can, per se, is astonishing. Connection: Tremendously straight-ahead (for Can anyways) pop-rock, with Mooney on lead vox. This could have been any number of late-sixties garage rock bands, except for the overwhelming tightness of the playing. Cool, grungy guitar, faux-greasy organ, and it turns out Can really could imitate anything. Cutaway: From 1969, this is a massive piece of several short segments strung together. As Krautrock goes, Faust was usually the band that put together this kind of project, but Can's version is, as you might expect, rather exotic. The biggest surprise on this track, and others from the album, is the level of consistency of sound. The stuff from '69 sounds as clear and focused as the stuff from '75, and in some cases, the band is laying down the same groove, or using the same ensemble textures. This song should be disorienting, but it's not because it wouldn't doesn't sound radically different from any other 18-minute stretch on the album. That said, be prepared for anything... |
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Personnel:
Irmin Schmidt:
Holger Czukay:
Michael Karoli:
Jaki Leibezeit:
Malcolm Mooney:
Damo Suzuki: |
