a r t i s t : CAN
t i t l e : Anthology
d a t e : 2007
l a b e l : Spoon Records
g e n r e : Progressive Rock
r l s. d a t e : Nov/2007
t r a c k s : 29
b i t r a t e : VBRkbps
s i z e : 227,4 MB
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Can's music is all around you, even if you've never actually
heard it. The band has had such a deep impact on rock and
experimental music that it's impossible not to have heard
something that bears its fingerprints. Can were as unlikely as
they were influential: Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt, both
students of early electronic and serial composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen, and the latter an associate of Fluxus musicians
LaMonte Young and Terry Riley; Jaki Liebezeit, a drummer who'd
made the rounds of Europe's free jazz scene; and Michael
Karoli, a young guitarist who happened to be a student of
Czukay. These four musicians would remain the core of Can for
most of the band's life.
It doesn't look like a recipe for a rock group, but that's
probably why the music they made was so unprecedented. Aside
from Stockhausen, their influences ranged from ethnic field
recordings to jazz to the elemental funk of James Brown to
Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, and Pink
Floyd. They made free improvisation and tape editing their
basis for composing, building songs around Liebezeit's
repetitive, driving percussion parts, which allowed the other
members plenty of room to roam without getting lost. It was
intellectual but funky-- serious music that was also fun and
interesting.
Though they'd initially intended to make ethnic music a
central part of the band's sound, the members found themselves
more and more taken by psychedelia and quickly came to sound
more like a true rock band. They recruited African-American
sculptor Malcolm Mooney to handle vocals. As a singer, Mooney
was a decided amateur, but he was intensely creative and
totally unshackled by any conventional sense of what a rock
vocalist was supposed to do. His most inspired performances
bordered on psychotic, emphasizing rhythm and interacting with
the instruments as though he were one of them.
Mooney's time with the band was limited-- he was only a member
from 1968 to 1969 and again for a brief period during a late
1980s reunion-- but he still made a lot of recordings with
them, and he features heavily on Anthology. The quintet
recorded its first album, Prepared to Meet Thy PNOOM, in 1968,
but it was flatly rejected by every record label they
approached, so they returned to the studio, recording with a
very basic two-track setup, and produced Monster Movie, which
became their debut in 1969 (PNOOM finally came out in 1981
under the title Delay 1968). Three of Monster Movie's four
tracks appear here on the first disc, sounding as fresh and
ferocious as ever.
The Velvet Underground-inspired "Father Cannot Yell" was the
first Can song, and it features Mooney's motor-mouthed,
rhythmic vocal low in the mix, with Czukay's bass right next
to it. "Outside My Door" is ripped open by distorted bells,
and the 20-minute "Yoo Doo Right", edited down from an
hours-long jam, points toward the stripped-down future funk
that characterized Can's classic early-70s output.
Mooney wasn't part of that lineup. His instability was part of
what made him great, but it was also what made him leave the
band and return to the U.S. on the advice of a psychiatrist in
1969. In search of a new vocalist, the band found Japanese
wanderer Damo Suzuki busking outside a cafΘ and invited him to
join. He performed with them the same night and proved to be a
perfect fit. Lyrics had always been secondary to the sound of
the voice in Can's music, but Suzuki took this to a new level,
often reducing his vocals to the most apt syllable for the
moment. He joins the funky crunch of "Halleluwah", from 1971's
masterful double LP Tago Mago, with a series of rhythmic "da
da"s, and it's impossible to imagine anyone singing anything
else over it.
"Halleluwah" is one of the songs that benefits most from the
superb remastering treatment given to all of Can's output in
the last couple of years. The song's militaristic drum pattern
and staccato bass line hit like a hammer now, and the mix on
every song is exceptionally clear, with none of the hiss and
murkiness that plagued early CD issues of Can's albums. The
band continued to develop its bracing, improvisatory style on
Tago Mago, 1972's Ege Bamyasi and 1973's Future Days, piecing
together its albums from edits of massive jam sessions in much
the same way that Miles Davis and Teo Macero pieced together
Bitches Brew and On the Corner at roughly the same time.
Each of those albums is well-represented on Anthology, though
"Vitamin C" or "Sing Swan Song" would've made a better, more
representative selection from Ege Bamyasi than the short edit
of the chaotic "Soup" that appears here. (EB's "Spoon", one of
Can's most accessible songs, is included.)
Oddly, the two tracks from Future Days are sequenced in the
middle of the second disc. "Moonshake" is perhaps the most
prototypical example of the minimal, rhythmic style that came
to be called motorik, with its metronomic drum pulse and
guitar parts that obediently serve the rhythm. The lack of
chronological sequencing is likely due to the fact that so
many of Can's best songs are quite long, often stretching past
15 minutes, but it also means that any listener who starts
here will have a tough time hearing their progression from
album to album.
Suzuki left the band in early 1974 after getting married and
becoming a Jehovah's Witness, and the remaining members were
unable to find a suitable replacement. Schmidt and Karoli
assumed vocal duties for 1974's underrated Soon Over Babaluma,
only represented here by the spooky, methodically rhythmic
"Dizzy Dizzy", which features Karoli's gypsy-ish violin part.
Soon is a complex, melodic, and strange record that deserves a
higher standing in the band's catalog, and it also effectively
marks the end of the band's classic period.
That isn't to say they didn't make good music afterward, but
nothing they recorded had the sheer innovative and primal
power of their first six years of work. Apart from the two
Future Days tracks, the second disc focuses on the band's late
output and early outtakes, with one track from Delay 1968 and
a fairly absurd five selections from Unlimited Edition, a
compilation of previously unreleased tracks from 1968-1975
that, while full of interesting material featuring both Mooney
and Suzuki, is really a fans-only release.
What the second disc does do with its 17 tracks is convey a
good idea of the wide range of styles Can covered. Delay's
early Mooney track "Uphill" is a chugging, intense song
covered in spastic fuzz guitar and one of the punkest things
they ever did, while "I Want More", from 1976's Flow Motion,
is post-punk before punk even happened, anticipating the
keyboard-driven new wave of the Human League and the
dancefloor-friendly sound of A Certain Ratio. It even became
an international hit.
Former Traffic members Rosko Gee and Rebop Kwaku Bah joined
the band for its final two albums, 1977's Saw Delight and
1978's Can. Gee took over the bass duties from Czukay, who
focused on sound effects, noise generators and shortwave radio
on Saw Delight and finally left the band over personal
disagreements that descended to a true low when band members
began unplugging each other on stage. The self-titled album
would be their last. There is some interesting music on these
albums, which feature a combination of frenetic percussion and
slow, ambient textures that still sounds somewhat unique--
even when they weren't at their best, Can were capable of
breaking new ground.
The band's last hurrah came a full 10 years later, when the
original quintet lineup reunited for Rite Time, an album that
has an interesting sonic character-- the way the backing
vocals are layered and compressed, for example, is neat-- but
you have to be a die-hard fan to get too far into this stuff.
Certain artists are represented just fine by their most-loved
songs, but Can isn't one of them. A 2xCD career anthology does
a good job of presenting Can's astounding versatility, but
it's best to hear the full albums, and if you like the first
disc of Anthology, you'll want to get all of them.
http://www.spoonrecords.com/news.html
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cd1
01-Father Cannot Yell [07:03]
02-Soup [02:49]
03-Mother Sky [06:38]
04-She Brings The Rain [04:06]
05-Mushroom [04:25]
06-One More Night [05:34]
07-Outside My Door [04:09]
08-Spoon [03:05]
09-Halleluhwah [05:37]
10-Aumgn [07:15]
11-Dizzy Dizzy [05:41]
12-You Doo Right [20:27]
cd2
01-Uphill [06:34]
02-Mother Upduff [04:30]
03-Doko E [02:28]
04-Musette [02:14]
05-Blue Bag [01:16]
06-TV Spot [03:03]
07-Half Past One [04:38]
08-Moonshake [03:01]
09-Future Days [09:30]
10-Cascade Waltz [05:36]
11-I Want More [03:31]
12-Animal Waves [08:12]
13-Don't Say No [06:33]
14-Aspectacle [05:49]
15-Below This Level [03:45]
16-Hoolah Hoolah [04:31]
17-Last Night Sleep [03:35]
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