Some seven minutes into “Dead Pigeon Suite,” a meandering 12-minute recording that Can had never released until 2012’s The Lost Tapes box set, the freeform jam suddenly snaps into focus. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit’s drums transform into a Möbius Strip-R&B groove as hammered on an oil drum. Singer Damo Suzuki’s asthmatic exhales and ad hoc nonsense turns into a shout: “Hey you, you’re losing you’re losing you’re losing you’re losing your Vitamin C!” Later, the band would go back to the tapes and trim this portion down into “Vitamin C,” one of the heaviest b-boy breakbeat jams ever conjured—lifted by everyone from Spank Rock to U.N.K.L.E, that telltale tom roll bobbing up on the soundtrack to Inherent Vice and Netflix’s short-lived “The Get Down.”
For a band whose legacy rests in part on the relentless, restless, sidelong sprawls of their discography—from Monster Movie’s “Yoo Doo Right” through the greater part of 1971’s Tago Mago to Soon Over Babaluma’s “Quantum Physics” and “Chain Reaction”—the 23-track comp The Singles shows a lesser-known aspect of the band. In fact, Can’s biggest breakthrough came not on kosmische mind-melters like “Aumgn” but rather via a three-minute toe-tapper entitled “Spoon.” It became the theme for a television thriller mini-series, unit-shifting hundreds of thousands of copies and landing them on the pop charts. Moments like “Spoon” and “Vitamin C” showed that—albeit briefly—Can also had a knack for turning bolts of improvised uncut cloth into something stunning and concise.
The comp opens with original singer Malcolm Mooney’s farewell moment, castrato-shouting “Soul Desert” on the plodding A-side and revealing the group’s mellow, soulful (and short-lived) side on “She Brings the Rain.” Soon after, Suzuki entered the fold, providing the perfect foil for the likes of bassist/producer Holger Czukay, guitarist Michael Karoli, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, and Liebezeit. For as high as that core group could take their spontaneous combustions, Suzuki and his pidgin yips kept the group within the earth’s gravitational field. He could turn a random phrase into a hook and something songlike would soon usher forth from the band, as on “Vitamin C.”
During their peak years—spanning from Tago Mago through Ege Bamyasi and Suzuki’s swan song with the group, 1973’s Future Days—the band operated at a supernatural level and could do no wrong, which The Singles all but confirms. Yes, the band made double-digit transportive epics during that span, but even jaunty cast-off tracks like “Shikako Maru Ten” and “Turtles Have Short Legs” show Can could shake you down in three minutes as well. The former is a svelte, snaking groove, its meter just tricky enough to avoid easy imitation. “Turtles” is a giddy, plinked piano shout-along, even if you can’t follow Suzuki’s lyrics.
It’s odd to have Can’s totemic works like “Halleluwah,” “Mushroom,” and “Future Days” cut to fit a 45—about as strange as saying that, in addition to his large canvases, Jackson Pollock also dribbled expertly onto cocktail napkins. “Halleluwah” is criminally spliced from 18-minutes to 3:38, but its magical polyrhythmic powers somehow remain undiminished. Still, such truncation puts the track in with the likes of other drum-heavy grunters of the era like Titanic and Barrabas.
Can happened upon another hit with 1976’s “I Want More.” It has little of the turbulent, gorgeous chaos of their glory days, the careening gibberish of Suzuki replaced by androgynous munchkin chants. But hearing Liebezeit stomp out a chrome-plated glam beat is a delight in and of itself, worth the extra minutes of “…And More.” Considered away from the rest of their discography, the serpentine progressive moves of “Splash” and percolating hard-rock “Vernal Equinox” are enjoyable sides. The same can’t be said, however, for the blues-rock grunt of “Don’t Say No.”
For a band that, for a time, conjured all manner of brilliance in either 3- or 20-minute increments, it’s especially agonizing that it was soon reduced to something as insipid as their 1978 single, “Can Can.” (You can almost imagine the thought process: “Let’s have Jaki lay down a 19th century can-can beat and we’ll just call it ‘Can Can’—because we’re Can and we can.”) The Singles traces both Can’s genius and how they ultimately ran out of ideas, losing all of their Vitamin C.
