When Kraftwerk effectively turned themselves into a museum piece, via sporadic full-album shows that began at MoMA in New York in 2012, it felt like Ralf Hütter might be eyeing up a way to call time on the legendary synthpop outfit. Where to go from here? There is one potential last hurrah that could get longstanding fans as excited as they were for the museum shows, albeit one that seems unlikely: a reformation of the "classic" Kraftwerk lineup, featuring Hütter, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür, and Karl Bartos. The latter joined the band in the mid 1970s and became much more than a sideman to Hütter and Schneider-- he has songwriting credits on some of the band’s most famous material, including "The Model", "Tour de France", and "Computer Love". A reunion isn't on the cards, but there's little doubt that having Bartos on stage would bring gravitas to the band, even if it had little discernable effect on the music played.
Bartos left Kraftwerk in 1990, amid a swirl of rumors that he was unhappy with the slow creative pace they had settled into. But an initial burst of work, notably with Electronic and his own Elektric Music, quickly faded to silence. Off the Record is only the second album he has made under his own name, primarily based around music he recorded long ago, dredged up from the vaults and given a 21st century gleam. Except, much like Kraftwerk's endless retooling of their work for live performance, much of it is firmly lodged in the past. At some point, approximately around the time of Electric Cafe, Kraftwerk stopped feeling like the future, instead morphing into a quaint look back at how they thought the world would be shaped during their 1970s heyday. Off the Record takes a similar approach. Given a chance to take old material and make it new, Bartos simply leaves it suspended in the period, making few notable advances.
The record is so bathed in retro that there are direct nods back to some of the Kraftwerk material he worked on. "Rhythmus" gives the "Numbers" beat a tweak, choosing to set it to a fuller musical backing and some achingly familiar robo-vocals. Bartos is one of the few people allowed to get away with such blatant mirroring of the past, but it's hard to escape the thought that he's done it all before, and better, and with a little more elegance and wit. A case in point: naming a song after the Atomium, a structure built for the 1958 World's Fair, just seems so obviously Kraftwerkian that it's redundant. The best Kraftwerk material was smarter than that; it was about great synth paeans to the German equivalent of Route 66 ("Autobahn"), or looking for beauty in minutiae ("Pocket Calculator"), or celebrating and warning about the onrush of technology ("Computer World"/"Radioactivity").
Perhaps it's unfair to judge Bartos next to the peerless heights his former band reached, but Off the Record clearly has aspirations to orbit exactly the same territory. Its nadir comes in "The Tuning of the World", a horribly clunky piece of auto-tuned sermonizing in which Bartos outlines his outlook on life. Elsewhere, there are attempts at updating some of the source material, but even that sounds decades behind; "International Velvet" resembles Air circa Moon Safari, while "Hausmusik" is a strange deviation into the light pop intonations of The The's "This is the Day". It's all impeccably executed and precisely arranged, as you'd expect from someone with Bartos's pedigree. But nothing here feels essential in the way that, say, Can's The Lost Tapes did. Instead, there are hints at the reasoning behind Kraftwerk's creative silence. Hütter may have endlessly spun his wheels, but at least he had the foresight to not tarnish his reputation by rehashing inferior material.
