Can have always been a little cagey about what is and isn't in their vaults. The received wisdom is that the German experimental pop group spent years in their studio, jamming constantly and recording everything, with bassist Holger Czukay editing the most promising tapes into the magnificent pieces that they released on record between 1969 and the mid-70s. They've always given the impression that their records were the result of grabbing whatever happened to be nearest at hand; when they've gone back into their archives for studio material in the past, they've resurfaced with outstanding stuff. Unlimited Edition from 1976, a collection of tapes that were lying around, includes career highlights like "Connection" and "Cutaway"; Delay 1968 is a complete, splendid album that the initial lineup of the band, with cracked American vocalist Malcolm Mooney, recorded before Monster Movie but somehow neglected to release until 1981.
For the past 30 years, though, all they've hauled up from the archive has been a few discs' worth of live material. So The Lost Tapes sounded like a very big deal: A 3xCD set distilled from 30 hours' worth of unissued material (spanning Can's entire original incarnation), it was assembled by Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and his son-in-law and frequent collaborator Jono Podmore, with the latter credited as editor. "Halcyon days, not outtakes," trumpeted the album's press release. That's not entirely true. A lot of these tracks are distinctly outtakes: alternate versions of familiar themes, or at least ideas Can executed differently elsewhere. "Dead Pigeon Suite", for instance, is 12 minutes of what appears to be exploratory jamming toward what became the taut, densely packed single "Vitamin C". It's fascinating to hear once or twice if you're a Can-head, but not terribly meaningful otherwise. (The title is a reference to the German TV movie, Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße, in which another version of it appears.)
"Messer, Scissors, Fork and Light", similarly, is Can working out the various hooks that coalesced into "Spoon". Half-familiar titles turn out to be germinal variations on "Mother Sky", "Soul Desert", and "Sing Swan Song". "Abra Cada Braxas" and "Blind Mirror Surf" aren't the same songs as Tago Mago's "Bring Me Coffee or Tea" and "Aumgn", but there's a family resemblance. There are lengthy live versions of "Spoon" and "Mushroom"-- not the same as the ones that appeared on last year's Tago Mago reissue, but of similar vintage-- as well as "One More Saturday Night", which is not a Grateful Dead cover but a live take of Ege Bamyasi's "One More Night". It's nice to hear appearances by both of Can's major singers, Mooney and Japanese hippie Damo Suzuki, although 10 minutes of Mooney chanting "are you waiting for the streetcar?!?" like a psychotic mantra is about eight too many.
The pity of The Lost Tapes' overambition is that it could easily be condensed to a single, first-rate album of genuinely new-to-record material. "Millionenspiel", the theme song from a 1970 suspense movie, is a terrific cut-and-paste rocker, featuring Michael Karoli slashing at a single whammy-barred chord on every downbeat and Czukay constructing a looped groove out of what sounds like amp noise. "Barnacles" is a disco-funk improvisation that appears to be from the late-70s period when bassist Rosko Gee had joined the group; it's the sort of thing that would have sounded as bandwagon-jumping as "Aspectacle" did at the time, and sounds as kickass as "Aspectacle" does now. And the jewel of the set is "Graublau", which I'm guessing comes from the sessions for Thomas Schamoni's film A Big Gray-Blue Bird that also yielded "She Brings the Rain": a thrilling suite, with Karoli shooting flames, the rest of the band in monomaniacal garage-rock mode, and Schmidt tossing shortwave-radio loops into the mix to give everyone something to attack and devour.
One more album as good as the good stuff: It's what everyone hopes for from their favorite defunct band. Can's archives, as it turns out, were deep enough for that. But they weren't infinitely deep-- not even three albums deep. Irmin Schmidt assessed the situation himself, when he was asked a few months ago whether there would be more releases from Can's trove of unissued recordings: "The rest is not worth putting out... That's sentimentality."
