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 café 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.
