Can

Can is yet another singularity in music history for which we have simply, in almost 40 years, just not come up with an answer for. Considering that Can was the most musically impressive and creatively innovative (if not commercially successful...that honor falls at the feet of Kraftwerk) of the whole late 60's/early 70's Krautrock horde, and seriously influenced artists as disparate as David Bowie, the Fall, Stereolab, Sonic Youth, and the cute Hanson brother, they still fall into the category of ignored gems from the past that most folks just have no idea about. Your local Best Buy won't stock them, until recently their albums were shockingly expensive and poorly issued, and most in the musical press will simply hand-wave them as extremely influential while providing little or no information about the band itself, much less what they actually sound like. Moreover, any buzz the band does generate is generally focused around its expansive 1971 double album Tago Mago, criminally dismissing anything that followed as a poor attempt to emulate that 'classic' and totally tossing the post-Suzuki albums to the shitpile as lame attempts at commerciality. Well, you know what? The best Can album ain't Tago Mago, the mid- to late-70's albums were not useless, and if I hear one more time that all this band did was metronomic Velvet Underground funk, I'm going to climb a clock tower and start taking some random passersby to the Promised Land, cochese. Simply put, Can is neither as weird or as earth-shatteringly great as some would have you believe - they indulged in their share of bizarre noise ('Spoon' and most of the rest of their Mooney-era records), and their reliance on street musicians and raving lunatics as their first two vocalists is sure to aid in the perception that their work is maybe slightly more challenging than your average Bread song. They do play long modal jams that hover around the same chord for a half hour or so, they do indulge in short (and sometimes not-at-all-so-short) explorations of dissonance, noise, and general and intentional eardrum destruction, and they do feature lyrics that blather and howl, sometimes all at the same time. But still, if you're versed at all in modal jazz music (especially in Bitches Brew/Live-Evil-era electrified Miles Davis), their jams don't seem nearly as repulsive as they might on first listen.

The thing with Can which sets them apart from their fellow Germans (much less their poncey British cousins in the prog-rock movement) is that not only were Can far more interested in pure, unadulterated noise than, say, Amon Duul II (not to mention better at it), they also had the Great Lost Famous Flame Jaki Liebezeit on skins, probably the most accomplished funk drummer ever born wearing Liederhosen whilst sucking down blood sausages with warm beer. This guy is insane when it comes to polyrhythms, laying down a superbly busy, tippity-tappity funk beat that bears more resemblance to a college marching drum corps than Charlie Watts. At some times you can attribute his ultra-complex beats to his judicious use of slapback echo, but a lot of the time it simply sounds like there's three or four drummers playing when it's really just ol' Jaki jamming on for dozens of minutes. Add on Holger's patented metronomic two-note basslines and you have a white boy funk that's as deep as anything that sprouted out of Augusta, Georgia in the same time period. There ain't nobody that could lay down the itchy groove like Can at their best, making the famous description of their sound as the Velvets meet James Brown seem as apt as it is intriguing. Sure, it also sounds like they're sexless mandroids, but who said you couldn't shake your ass as an electric sheep, anyway?

What is embarrassing, however, is their attempts to reconcile with current musical trends. The first records are marred by a very self-conscious attempt to complete with the lo-fi psychedelic bands that were no doubt their main competition in the late 60's - the overuse of the ice-pick-in-the-forehead fuzz pedal, for one thing, brings to mind the worst of the Strawberry Alarm Clock far quicker than it does the best of White Light/White Heat. Karoli was simply not the acid-rock axe god he was cast to be, and his best work seems always to occur when he's playing as part of, or as an intricate counterpoint to, his killer rhythm section. Also, while their late 70's, post-Damo albums feature some interesting excursions into world beat and ruminative, Eno-like inertial sound, they also have several godawful attempts to score a Continental disco hit that sound like a bunch of geeky college professors covering 'The Disco Duck' using only common household hand-held tools. About as uncool as it gets, in other words, making it so much easier for style mavens to simply write this whole era off rather than dig for the golden tones of Saw Delight.

So Can is not the entire answer, as some might have you believe (I have a hard time reconciling the fact that a lot of people attribute them with inventing electronic music, or punk rock, or world beat, or electro-funk, or rap, or whatever else they're always credited for), but they did inhabit a rare space that not too many groups have had the chops, or the balls, to attempt to reach. They're the obscure answer to an obscure question that somehow collects Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lou Reed, Bootsy Collins, and a ranting street preacher in the same sentence at the same time. And while they may lift your head clean off, they leave your booty firmly planted on the One, and that, my friends, is their greatest achievement of all.

Monster Movie - Mute 1969

'Father Cannot Yell' - Malcolm cannot sing. The general idea on these first two Can records, the ones made with 'interpretive' (read: absolutely fucking horrible) American vocalist Malcolm Mooney is that while the basic repetitive rhythm section sound is in place (Kumpa whumpa kumpa whumpa, doing dwoing doing-dwoing, in other words), everything else is totally fucked up and amateurish and therefore far more taxing to listen to than the comparatively more advanced Suzuki-era records. It also sounds like it was recorded on a hundred-year old wax cylinder using a knitting needle as a stylus and two creamed corn cans connected by some Christmas yarn as a microphone, but that's those wacky Yurrupians fer ya. Probably spending all their money on tiny little wire-framed glasses and moustache wax, anyway. Evidently, the band pretty much recorded their albums as homemade demos on a 2-track tape machine (about as much technology as the average K-Mart boombox, in other words) for the first several years of their existence, so don't blame some unnamed German recording engineer for the sonic failure of this album. The dude who pressed 'record' was probably the same poor roadie guy who had to change the strings on the guitars, load the amps into the van, and convince Mooney he wasn't a Californian Condor and couldn't fly out of a 5th story window and coast gracefully to the ground. Blame Can for being poor, cheap bastards instead.

Nothing can excuse Mooney's endless phlegm-choked, projectile-vomited vocals, though. You might think hiring a dude that sounds like a schizophrenic street ranter might be a cool idea for a rock band, in the same uber-ironic way as having a 350-pound psychotic who writes songs about McDonalds be your singer might be cool, but the people who think so should be sentenced to listen to Malcolm's tuneless blather five or six times in a row. Now, 'Yoo Doo Right' starts out kinda cool with its near-whispered insistency, and the screaming at the ending of 'Outside My Door' sounds like the Germs or something, but the rest of the time this guy is an irritating bore. The lyrics aren't even evocative - 'You gotta move on you gotta move on, man!' is about as deep as they go, and a lot of the time they seem obsessed with mid-60's garage-rock worthy girls 'n' love 'n' cars themes that further act to reduce the 'far out' impact of this record. This isn't cutting edge vocalizing, this is banal, stupid junk masquerading as something meaningful. I can only guess that the Germans couldn't figure out what Mooney was singing anyway, and probably thought the guy was being prophetic or something.

Talking about irritations, don't even get me started on Karoli's guitar tone here. Evidently the guy got his hands on the single most disgusting, demon-infested drillbit buzzsaw of a fuzz pedal. Most likely made out of old electric fan parts and Pure Evil, this thing renders the man's guitar into the string-instrument equivalent of children being tied down and fed to starving rats. As rhythmically athletic as 'Father Cannot Yell' is, the genocidal screeching of the fuzztone guitar just murders the groove and tosses it off the causeway. The bass and drums sound like they've been recorded from a couple of rooms down, and the guitar is fed directly into the My First Sony tape deck at obscene volume. I hear those squeals and all I can think of are the levels reading so far into the red they've turned purple, and the poor recording heads scrawling electric death onto the tape. I'm thankful Karoli gives the song (and Mooney - listen to his panting about 4:30 through) some time to breathe, but before long the root canal resumes. Luckily, the pedal gets turned down slightly for 'Mary Mary So Contrary', a slow, dramatic little thing that, if you squint your eyes real tight and ignore Karoli as best you can, almost has a melody. Mooney steals his lyrics from Mother Goose, of course, but this song builds some genuine tension even as it sounds cheaper than a pair of Bangkok Air Jordans. 'Outside My Door' isn't weird, it isn't even Can - if this thing isn't a Troggs cover, I'll eat my hat. Sure, Mooney screams like his balls are covered in grape jam and he's being attacked by a pack of weasels, but a Nugget this is not. Finally, I suppose 'Yoo Doo Right', as a 20-minute metronomic jam track which utilizes something more than one but definitely less than three separate notes, represents the arrival of the 'true' Can, but the groove is never one locked into convincingly nor are the jams of much consequence at all. Sure, it isn't as regressive and cheaply garage rock Exclamation Point and the Declarations as 'Outside My Door' (it still took guts to be this single-mindedly rhythmic in 1969), but absolutely nothing justifies it being as long as it is unless the band were actually trying to make Mooney scream himself to death. That's definitely forgivable, but they were ultimately unsuccessful, as it turns out. There's parts where members of the band drop out for minutes at a time, no doubt to go and weep softly in a quiet room at the fact that they hired Anton the Homeless Guy from In Living Color as their frontman, but never does Mooney shut up for any humane length of time. Just blah blah 'You do right!' blah blah 'Believer outta me!' blah blah. I'll put it this way - remove Malcolm from the album altogether and you might score this one as high as an A-. Keep him on here and I almost can't recommend you listen to it at all.

Then I remember how cool some of those grooves could be if you could hear them, how Czukay rocks the fuck out of his lines on 'Father' or how the keyboards on 'Mary Mary' wrench the heart as much as Karoli's guitar wrenches the eardrums. And then I have to say listen, but keep your guard up.

Capn's Final Word: Very nearly (and sometimes completely) ruined by the bat-shit crazy fellow and the I-don't-know-how-to-turn-down-my-guitar fellow, but very nearly redeemed by the funkmeister fellow and the bass player fellow.

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Soundtracks - Mute 1970

Essentially the document of the transitional period between the Malcolm Mooney psychedelic weirdos era and the Damo Suzuki trance funk weirdos era, Soundtracks reminds me of a crapload of similar albums from 1969-70 like the Zabriskie Point soundtrack (featuring Pink Floyd!) and Atom Heart Mother (featuring a picture of a cow! And the London Symphony Orchestra! And Pink Foyd!) inasmuch as there's lots of screeching, sustaining fuzz guitar over crashing, oceanic rhythmic backing, all conspiring together to make it sound, well...soundtracky. Except good! We're not talking "The Bodyguard" Original Soundtrack here, nor are we including Michael Kamen and his band of cello-sawing idiots. Parts of Soundtracks sound positively inviting after something as purposefully caustic as Monster Movie - Karoli spins out his jazz chops on the loungey 'Don't Turn the Light On', perfectly suited to a scene where some dude in polyester sailor pants pours a martini for a gorgeous, Afro-ed black girl in a flowery halter top while fluffing his chest hair, in other words. Same with 'She Brings the Rain', which could easily have fallen unawares from the first side of Pink Floyd's Meddle album, right before the one about St. Tropez and after the one where the dogs barks all the fucking time.

Similarly, 'Mother Sky' takes the 'Yoo Doo Right'/'Father Cannot Yell' violence and remakes it with Damo Suzuki's far-more-soothing near-inaudible garble rather than Malcolm Mooney's ridiculous scraping noises. They also learn something about dynamics here - yeah, the first several minutes have the usual bag-of-killer-bees guitar fuzz nonsense, but at about 3 minutes it breaks down to simply the bass, drums, and Damo, and for a short time it achieves hypnosis. Karoli's inopportune mangling breaks the mood again, of course, but that two-note bassline still works a notable bit of magic over the course of the next 8 minutes or so. 'Soul Desert', one of the two remaining Mooney tracks here, acts as the anti-'Sky' - a gross, unhappy bit of garble that sounds like the band depressedly providing a soundtrack to Mooney having an epileptic fit with a microphone in his mouth. It's a suitable kissoff to the MM (Malcom Mooney/Monster Movie. Gee, ain't I the clever boy?) era, hearing the difference in talent and listenability from one crazy street rambler to another. Fittingly, Malcolm's real send off happens with a version of the early track 'Thief', which is also featured on the Delay 1968 early-rarities disc. 'Thief' brings the absolute pain, a minor scale arrow through the soul that nearly screws the 'Mary Mary Quite Contrary' psycho-ballad to unbearable heights of tension. Malcolm, perhaps most impressively, keeps his voice in absolute check, and it sounds like he's being swallowed by the dark well in his mind. I guess that's the place all ex-Can singers end up....some endless pit where the coat hangers are upside down and they star in the garage band of the century.

Thus, the helm is left to Damo, who takes charge with 'Little Star of Bethlehem' and its wacky, acid-casualty stories of the tangerine seeds. But while Mooney was tortured and poorly mannered, Damo is upbeat and as fonky in his own way as Jaki is. Damo is a star, and the killer rap he spins out on 'Bethlehem' is the highlight of the track. Soon, the band would push their synergy to the natural limits and beyond, but for now we've got two legs on terra firma, lending a sense of fundamental strength to the pop Can we have presented here. Let the countdown begin.

Going down...corr-ection - going up!

Capn's Final Word: Perhaps the past is best left forgotten. Like this record.

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Capn's Note:

It appears there is some confusion over my version of Soundtracks as it includes several songs that the version currently available from Spoon records does not. Apparently the 'real' version ends after 'She Brings the Rain' at about 35 minutes, but mine contains 'Thief', 'The Little Star of Bethlehem', and 'Pnoom', all of which are also available on the Delay 1968 demo/singles set. I don't know if this is some weird Russian version, but I got mine from allofmp3.com, a Russian piratniy site, so that's definitely a possibility. Personally, 'Thief' and 'Bethlehem' are two of the best songs on Soundtracks, so I prefer my version to something that would end with 'Rain'.

Tago Mago - Mute 1971

It's funny that when 'normal' pop bands release double studio albums, professional critics fall all over themselves to damn the fact that the artist has abandoned all quality control and self-restraint and has just released everything and the kitchen sink upon an unsuspecting public. There's always stuff that's deemed to be superfluous or otherwise worthless, and the question is nearly always asked whether a single album would've simply been better than a double one. Oddly enough, Tago Mago has received some sort of Get Out of Critical Jail Free card for this one, everyone falling all over themselves to award it a perfect grade as Can's most 'far out' and expansive record. I call bullshit. As interesting as a the Voice of God moans on 'Augmn' are, there's absolutely no justification for this 4-minute expanse of organ noises and chanting to become a 17:33 album side. This isn't an album where one or two songs may be excised for the greater good of a killer single LP, this is an album where even the best song (the 18+ minute 'Halleluwah') crosses the line between hypnotic meditation and dozing off to sleepyland a couple-three too many times. Yeah, 'Halleluwah' has one of the coolest funk grooves ever put to vinyl, a swirling mass of well-placed high hats and surgeon-precise bass drum hits that somehow manages to sound sexy and casket cold at the same time. Even Karoli's guitar finds its place, fuzztone off, sending in wiry little commentary and desolate sounding single-note runs as the medicine man ceremony blazes through the night. I'll still contend, however, that after the first breakdown (when the drums halt and we're left floating in weightlessness for a few pregnant moments about 4:45 through) 'Halleluwah' ceases to blaze and turns into an overlong bore. The guitar solos are funky, but compared to similarly spiky lines spun by San Francisco acid rock bands four or five years before, dreadfully undercooked. (I hate to bring it up as it's frightfully typical of me, but Jerry Garcia circa Live Dead would've blown the fucking doors off Karoli, in a very similar if he'd have ever jammed on this song). It turns out that Can really is just an acid rock band at heart, albeit one with a genius drummer and a more-patient-than-usual bass player. Is there really anything on the last, say, 12 minutes of this track that couldn't have been done better by a band of longhairs in front of a pulsating jelly-mold blob light show at the Fillmore West in 1967? It really heads nowhere. Suzuki raps fine on the catchy chant of 'Halleluwah' It's a great, monumental groove, but as a jam it's got some lessons to learn.

The other 'major' track on Tago Mago that receives constant praise is even shakier. 'Mushroom Head' is the audio equivalent of the bizarre Mod Art album cover as the Mooney Suzuki sees the mushroom head six or seven hundred times. The lyrics here are a major distraction from what's good about this track - the synthy, spidery lead guitar line and the completely inappropriate funk drum beat. If they'd had the guts to keep this instrumental, it'd be haunting as anything in their catalogue, but Damo is like the irritating kid who keeps waking you from a great dream with his pointless, drama-queen yelping. 'Paperhouse' is much better and, to me at least, much much creepier. The reverse echo washes and Moody Blues-ish verses indicate that some level of care went into this song. Most of this album (in fact, quite a bit of the early Can's material) was edited down from lengthy jams that had only the slightest bit of preplanning involved, but 'Paperhouse' has that certain element of arrangement that makes it into something more than just a jazzy head with a lengthy guitar freakout in the middle (which, to be sure, is what it is at its core. Shit, again, that's what most of this stuff is...). 'Oh Yeah' is formless and spacey, but again, I'm able to discern far more intentional structure and feel a lot more of a resultant kick in the crotch because of it than, say, the endless coda to 'Halleluwah'.

The second half of Tago Mago takes this obscene dragging out of thin ideas to sick new lows. 'Augmn' is nearly as long as 'Halleluwah', but it performs a funkendectomy and leaves the track an arhythmic, atonal mess of grinding violin sounds and other various sorts of death that were probably attributed to the continuing influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen by any rock critic too yellow to admit Can had taken an enormous Teutonic dump on the third side of their 'best' album. Again, I see 'Augmn' as working extremely well over the course of say, 7 or 8 minutes, but as its stretched out to the duration of the average session of coitus or the average length of time George W. Bush works seriously over the course of a weekday, it's an absolute fucking embarrassment. Hey, I like inventive noise, too, and at least there's no babies screaming or Yoko Ono talking about her megalomaniacal pubic hair or whatever, but 'Augmn', man...it sucks. To follow it up with the similar-yet-more-offensive 'Peking O' pushes the situation from one of overenthusiastic experimentation to one of sheer abject aggression against the listener. When Damo begins screaming like his tonsils are being eaten by dung beetles around minute two, all I can do is sit back and laugh at those people who claim Tago Mago is a journey into madness or some other such pretentious ass-blarting. Unless madness includes the use of a bossa nova beat and the sound of someone making a birthday balloon make squeaky fart noises, this is a case of a bunch of Germans with too much tape and too much time, and a bunch of critics who praise childish banging-on-cooking-pots bullshit because Julian Cope told them to rather than figuring out if the stuff is actually worth anyone's time.

Still, I have to give Tago Mago a generally positive review - the first several minutes of every song through (and including) 'Augmn' is worthy of a heap of praise, and I doubt you'll hear a rhythm section as sexy as these guys are on 'Halleluwah' for the rest of the year. But this album is as flawed as Muhummad Ali's CAT scan, and a good half of it is not just shit, it's irritating, artsy shit that is somehow intended to be taken seriously.

Capn's Final Word: Please 'scuse me if I manage to refrain from paying too much credit to Germans pissing in the wind.

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Ege Bamyasi - Mute 1972

The one and only concept album about a can of vegetables (and okra at that! Chop those fuckers up, dunk 'em in beer batter, and let's get deep fryin', y'all!) Ege Bamyasi is usually not praised as highly as Tago Mago, but that's only because it's easier for your girlfriend and your mom to listen to it. So can Miles Davis, who must've stolen about 3/4ths of his 1973 On the Corner album from the opening 'Pinch', which does that intoxicating 'burbling with action' thing that made albums like Sly and the Family Stone's Fresh such a volcanic piece of body funk. The thing is, to me 'Pinch' never loses the thread - this pack of jungle drums and feedback squalls was designed to be as kaleidoscopic and jarring as this - if you don't feel the clockwork pulse of a 'Yoo Doo Right' or an 'Halleluwah', it's because you're thinking too hard. 'Pinch' may well be in three or four time signatures within the length of a few bars, but the same pulse is there as it always was...it's just evolved beyond the capacity of the average pasty hipster white-boy indie rock fan to comprehend. You know - the kind who would only buy a James Brown record as an ironic joke. The kind who YOU, Dear Reader, and I, the Capn, must pledge to eradicate from this world.

You want to know why Tago Mago gets a B+ and Ege Bamyasi gets an A? Because 'Sing Swan Song' sounds nothing like 'Pinch', yet it's got as much or more intensity than the already-riveting album opener. For probably the first time, Damo Suzuki's vocals anchor a song rather than distract from it (or simply run along side it, like a dog chasing a car. Except with more yelping.) 'Sing Swan Song' would be a devastating album closer as darkness envelopes it at the close like a candle being choked of oxygen. Again, things take a turn with 'One More Night', which is the first true return to the drums-first rule of Tago Mago, but...better! 'One More Night' is warm and pulsating, Karoli's guitar providing knowing commentary, the whole thing like a percolating orgy of syncopation. It never yells. Never attempts to recreate a Blue Cheer guitar hero wankfest. Never loses the pulse in favor of pointless, thoughtless, mindless, tasteless noisemaking. This is the clockwork orange at work - a controlled fit, a piece of twitching, undulating flesh existing purely for the groove. 'Vitamin C' isn't much more than a continuation of 'Night', except with a chorus of sorts (and a goofy one at that - 'Hey you! You're losing, losing, losing your Vitamin C!'). Now, 'C' seems less useful than 'One More Night', at least until the wicked-brilliant Doors-y organ solo fades in, because it really does exist only to showcase Jaki's continued genius on the drums. But what about it is different than 'Halleluwah', in that regard? Not a whole lot, except it's only about 18% as long as that song, that's all.

The tick-tock suite thus finished, the 'Soup' begins its rolling boil as a downright hard rock freakout/mess that breaks the heretofore subdued emotional tone of Ege Bamyasi into a teeth-gritting rage. It too breaks down into a fit of random burping and farting before it's all over, but five minutes of 'Soup' schizophrenia is far more palatable than 11 minutes of 'Augmn' followed by damn near that much of 'Peking-O'. Hell, I even think I like that noise section. It brings into stark relief how fun and unmalicious 'I'm So Green' is as a followup. Not since 'I Want You/She's So Heavy' > 'Here Comes the Sun' has their been a more sincere, satisfying, and abrupt release of tension between two songs on an album. 'Spoon', which ended up by some cosmic lineup of the planets to be a minor hit in the UK, ends the album with another run through the bush of ghosts ala 'Pinch', and brings the album around full circle with a clear-headed and sharp sense of direction.

Ege Bamyasi is so clearly, so obviously, so undeniably superior to Tago Mago that the endless shortchanging of this record as second banana to its more 'compelling' predecessor troubles and disgusts me. This album takes that step beyond the genius-by-accident happenstance of Tago Mago and begins making GREAT MUSIC on PURPOSE. A good half of Tago Mago sucked because it was improvised with absolutely no direction or purpose. Ege Bamyasi never gets lost, and barely even begins to meander for a few short sections, plus the rhythms are every bit as kickass as Tago Mago, there's more variety, more mind-bending improvisation....this should by all means be considered as Can's triumph. Keep your 'Mushroom Head', fools.

Capn's Final Word: Tastier, fresher, more nutritious, and almost zero pointlessness. The Can that everyone's truly afraid of.

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Future Days - Mute 1973

Can once again take a left turn, now the fourth (!) consecutive album they've pirouetted their style, yet somehow retaining the same general feel and texture that made them cute and cuddly and lovable in the first place - the metronomic drums and bass, the tasteful and tight guitar work, the forays into random noise and encounters with pure chaos, except performed with such a clam and grace as to provoke some into calling this one of the birthplaces of ambient music. The problem is that, when I think of ambient music anyway, I think of pretentious, monolithic music-behind-glass - beigeist thumb-sucking bullshit ripoff records that point up just how disconnected and sexless white intellectual society has become. Ambient music in the form of Brian Eno's much-touted Apollo or On Land albums makes me think of Victorian conservatism made real for the rocket age. It's not just that it whitewashes or mutes the emotion and sensual quality inherent in all other types of music, from gospel to free jazz, to black metal to bluegrass, it pretends humanity isn't necessary, and I think that's downright repulsive.

If Future Days is ambient music (or, to be fair, proto-ambient music), Can is the GG Allin of ambient artists, because this album is one of the most sensually connected albums I've ever heard. Take the burbling funk of Ege Bamyasi and filter it through a couple of Snuggle fabric softener sheets, program Karoli to the 'David Gilmour' preset, turn Damo's mic almost to zero, and you have Future Days. The rhythm stays as heartbeat-steady as always, and a full three-quarters of the players in this band do nothing more at any given time than slave to that groove. Does this sound like the formless, mushy, unsalted audio oatmeal that would become ambient stasis music in the 1980s? Fuck no. Can you read to it, sleep to it, have it on in the background while you recaulk your bathtub and never lend more than a subconscious tendril to its percolating waves of radiated warmth and water? Yes, but you can also rage with it, dance to it, and probably fuck to it.

If variety's your bag, you may want to stick with Ege Bamyasi, because with one exception, Future Days really does sound like a single song, or in Can's case, a single jam, edited down more-or-less arbitrarily into four tracks. Of course, it's a brilliant jam, and it rocks like a controlled hydrogen bomb explosion at times, but some of us don't have the patience to ride out oceanic shifts in tone and theme and would rather be fed from the combination platter. Sure, why not? But in its particular niche, Future Days is unequalled. Only 'Moonshake' is appreciably different than the other three tracks, both in its short length (3 minutes as opposed to over 8 minutes for the next-shortest track) and in its goofy, near-flippant bip bop mood. If Paul McCartney would've written a Can song, it would have been Moonshake (okay, okay, it probably would've been 'She Brings the Rain', but hang with me here). Considering that three-fourths of Can are, at heart, jazz musicians (everyone except Karoli, who's also about 10 years younger than the other instrumentalists), and so much of their music appears to be influenced by (and influencing, possibly) the cutting-edge jazz fusion of the time, it's no surprise that their songs unfold like frameworks for improvisation than verse-chorus-verse pop locksteps. Of course, I sorta blasted Tago Mago for pretty much the same off-the-cuff, unmannered flippancy, but the difference between Ege Bamyasi/Future Days and Tago Mago is that on the later albums, instead of simply being an overly-exciting drum machine for the fuzz guitar to freak out on top of, the rhythm section itself becomes an improvisational instrument. The groove may remain static, but the parts the make up that groove breath and pulsate, burble to the top and fall back. One can easily spend the 20 minute length of the centerpiece 'Bel Air' simply listening to the gentle shifting of the tom-tom drums versus Holger Czukay's bassline.

If Future Days has a fault, it's that there is simply zero input from Damo Suzuki. Pretty much every track has at least some vocals on it (I think...Bel Air has almost none, thugh), but it's absolutely obliterated under the weight of the band performing its impression of the formation of the universe. Damo, at one time, could hold the band in his sway (I'm thinking of tracks like 'Mushroom Head' here), but here he's ground into dust, a man in a life raft trying to sing his little rhymes in the middle of a hurricane. Therefore, all of the emotional focus falls on the band, and luckily they have their responsibility well in hand. That said, I do enjoy the 'blah blah blah blag, Future Days...' hook on the title track, and would hate to do without it.

Favorite moments? The short introduction of the boogie woogie guitar line just about a minute through 'Spray'. I tell you, from a technical standpoint, especially when recording live as a band into a 2-track machine that doesn't give you the option of overdubbing, this is impressive as hell. This is the kind of thing that Miles Davis did on Bitches Brew, or, more accurately, In a Silent Way, which in style and structure bears more than just a passing resemblance to this record. To say that Future Days is hypnotic in its majesty is to say that Jessica Simpson has developed a decent figure for a young woman.

Capn's Final Word: Not ambient, but universal...one of the best space-rock albums in the history of the Jet Age.

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