Sadly, I barely even like this album as much as that one. I do find some amusement in the idea that Can was once a weird sort of psychedelic acid-rock band, and there's definitely some good material, but this album has many of the flaws that would show themselves on MM. The rhythm section is basically anonymous (not bad, but not remarkable either), Schmidt doesn't really sound necessary, and while Karoli displays a versatile set of licks, he can hardly carry the album himself. And man, I just get really tired of Mooney in a hurry. On half of the tracks here, I find him actively irritating, and this is a serious problem.

Of the seven tracks, only three tickle my fancy enough that I'd want to hear them all the way through again, even if the other tracks tend to have at least some points of interest (this is why, despite my largely negative attitude towards many of the album's attributes, I can still barely squeeze out a 7 rating for it). "Nineteenth Century Man" sounds like the band trying to do its own version of a Chuck Berry rocker, with Karoli hammering out bluesy licks over and over. I wouldn't go so far as to call this a "normal" rock song, but it's as close as you'd get from Can for a little while, and it's a pretty good one. "Thief" is a remarkably moving ballad, where Mooney's worn vocals provide a strong burst of emotional power as he sings, "why must I be the thief ... why must I be the thief ..." over a simple atmospheric guitar line (interspersed with some slow emotional soloing on par with anything on Soundtracks). For once, Mooney is able to make his voice produce a strong emotional effect, and this is probably the best track he did with the band. Later on, then, comes "Uphill," an amusingly noisy chugging rocker with more Mooney blabbering that's at least coherent enough not to be distracting. It might not deserve to be almost 7 minutes long, but I've heard worse.

The other tracks aren't great, though. "Butterfly" just seems like it should be better than it is, as Karoli's ultra-minimalistic guitar pounding gives an ironically epic feel to the sound, and for a couple of minutes Mooney's ramblings about a dying butterfly sound kinda awesome. Unfortunately, while this might have made a decent 3-minute track, it gets stretched well past the 8-minute mark, without any especially interesting instrumental tricks or without any significant shifts in dynamics or anything to break the tedium, and I get tired of it soon. It's easy to see how this has elements of Can jamming that would come later, but the band had a long way to go in making its jamming into something that could capture the interest of a plebe like me. "Pnoom" is a 30-second throwaway (amusing enough, though), "Man Named Joe" is an upbeat romp but kinda stupid, and the closing "Little Star of Bethlehem" starts off sounding promising before forgetting to go anywhere at all for seven minutes. These aren't the worst things in Can's career, but I'd have absolutely no reason to care about them if they didn't have "historical significance."

In short, I'm probably missing something with this material, but I don't really feel any kind of gaping void in my life from not appreciating this album more. They might not have sounded like anybody else of the time, but I'm not necessarily sure we should be crediting new and exotic ways of intermittently sucking. Seek out "Thief" (and maybe "Nineteenth Century Man" and "Uphill") however you can, but don't break a sweat over the rest.

Unfortunately, there are a few things that pop out on further listens that have come to irritate me. The first is a realization of just how little actually happens in these tracks. There are some blistering moments from Karoli, yes, but they occur at a far lesser frequency than they would on subsequent albums, and I'm really hard-pressed to think of many especially interesting moments, technically or atmospherically, that come out of Schmidt's keyboards. Furthermore, while the rhythm section certainly seems perfectly solid on this album, there's never a time on the album where I can step back and go, "Wow, now that is the Can rhythm section in action." In short, the group seems like a decent jam band here, but it's difficult for me to convince myself that they're that much more than that with this album.

This problem, as well as the little issue of Mooney as vocalist, manifests itself most openly and plainly in the 20-minute "Yoo Doo Right." At first, it seems like a pretty cool track; Mooney bellows out a small set of lines with passion, the band holds steady with a fairly hypnotic pattern behind him, and it seems like this is a classic in the making. But then it starts to become clear that the band, after laying a solid foundation, is going absolutely nowhere with this jam, and when you look at the clock and realize there are 15 minutes left in the track after seeing it's going nowhere, that makes for some rather discomforting listening. Furthermore, while Mooney's lines seem kinda hypnotic and resonant at first, there comes a point after a while where all he's doing is softly creaking them out in the background over and over and over again, as if he's not even paying attention to the rest of the band and isn't muttering to help the track but instead is muttering only because he can't get himself to stop. It's not enjoyable, and it's not interesting, so why should I want to listen to this track in its entirety again? I sure can't think of a reason.

The three tracks on the first side noticably better, fortunately, though still not quite at the "Classic Can" level. "Father Cannot Yell" features Karoli's and Czukay's fiercest, loudest, most pumping and best attacks on the album, and even Mooney sounds ok for the most part, even kinda helping things out whenever he climaxes into his "and the father hasn't been born yet hasn't been born yet" shtick. There's also that cool part where he starts making wordless "uh" vocal sounds in rhythm to the rest of the band, helping the band in kind of the same way Suzuki would later on. Yup, if there's a reason to buy Monster Movie, it's gotta be "Father Cannot Yell."

The band's cover of "Mary, Mary So Contrary," meanwhile, is rather lovely, if overlong. There's no real catharsis to be gained from it (unlike on much of the next album), and Mooney yells too much as the track goes on, but Karoli's guitar wails have a painful beauty all their own, so dismissing the track altogether would seem like a mistake to me. And finally, the side-closer, "Outside My Door," kinda sounds like what Barrett-era Pink Floyd would sound like if they decided to bring in a harmonica as a primary instrument, and except for Mooney's ugliness at the end, it's a nice piece of astral garage-rock (!).

Still, positives aside (and there are quite a few of them, to be sure), this is a really rough beginning for "The Can" (as they called themselves at this point). Some actually consider this to be the band's peak, but I can't buy that notion at all; there's simply not enough strong manifestations of the traits that would make Can so renowned, and there aren't enough quality "supplemental" traits to make up for the lack of the primary ones. If you're getting into Can's early period, this should be the last album you pick up. It's historically significant, yes, but not that much more.

As mentioned, two of the tracks on here are from when Mooney was still with the group, before his schizophrenia completely overwhelmed him and he had to take off. One of them, the closing "She Brings the Rain," is actually quite nice. It's completely unlike anything the band would ever release in the rest of its career, a perfectly conventional and pleasant jazz-pop number whose total lack of weirdness probably helps explain why the album gets largely overlooked (though I sincerely hope I can give Can fans more credit than that). The other one, however, the side-one closer "Soul Desert," is a total disgrace, and amply shows that Mooney had to go. What's pretty odd to me, actually, is that it's not just Mooney's singing itself that bothers me so much on this track, though that certainly is an incredible irritant. No, what really strikes me is how stiff and uninvigorating the backing track sounds, especially in comparison to the instrumental textures on the rest of the album. It's almost as if the band had to throw off the shackles of Mooney's presence, not just to improve the vocals but to give themselves freedom to really cut loose themselves, in order to reach its full potential.

And boy, is that potential reached in the other five tracks. The opening "Deadlock," as well as its reprise, "Deadlock (Title Music)," is one of the most powerful emotional experiences in the Can catalogue, mainly because of the GORGEOUSLY mournful guitar sound that Karoli pulls out. Suzuki's waillings in unison with the guitar lines may be completely indiscernable, but the phrasing he uses complements the overall mood (whatever it exactly might be) to perfection. The "(Title Music)" reprise is even more stately, pushing the guitar line into the background and pushing the booming percussion and (in parts) Schmidt's chordings into the foreground, and while it's not as gorgeous as its predecessor, it's certainly worth all of its 1:40 of space.

The other two tracks on side one manage to pull off the simultaneous feat of not sounding as "twisted" as I usually think of Can as being, and of sounding twisted enough that I couldn't imagine any other band doing tracks like this. "Tango Whiskeyman" is a good counterexample to show what I mean when I say Mooney's presence made the band too stiff and rigid and awkward; this shows (to my ears, anyway) a much more confident, much more interesting Jaki than the one playing behind Mooney, as his "ethnic" percussion rhythms (and come to think of it, was anybody in 'Western' pop music really bringing in "ethnic" rhythms of this kind back in 1970? There sure weren't any Talking Heads around yet, for sure!) give a neat flair to a folk-pop ballad with a catchy melody and an alienish vocal part. "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone" is even better, a demonstration of Can's mastery of cold, robotic, hypnotic bass-heavy pop-rock made as paranoid as possible by Damo's slurred vocals. And dig those Easterny wind-instrument noises (are they recorders? I can't completely tell) that act as sprinkles on this donut of paranoid depression!

The main attraction of the album, though, is undoubtedly the 14:30 "Mother Sky." From the very first moments of Karoli's guitar pyrotechnics, underpinned by the groove-power of Jaki and Holger setting the standard (to that point) of how a rhythm section is supposed to sound when functioning as a "normal" rhythm section, I am entranced, up to the very end. Suzuki is rousing and hypnotic, Karoli just rips whenever the focus comes around to him (and he takes on several styles and moods throughout), Schmidt makes some solid contributions of his own near the end, and the rhythm section plows on and on in the tightest manner possible. Of course, this doesn't stop Jaki from having his own special spotlight, either; all the while holding together the groove of the whole, he gets in some terrific polyrhythmic passages starting around the 5:00 mark and going on for a couple of minutes, proving that he could be even more than the world's best metronome. Man, if you've wondered why I was so down on "Yoo Doo Right" overall, it's because I knew this band had, somewhere inside it, the potential for something as amazing as "Mother Sky." "Halleluwah" ranks a little higher in my book for being awesome for 18 minutes instead of 14-and-a-half, and because it's more intriguingly disturbing, but this sucker rocks in a way even Halleluwah doesn't pull off, and that says something.

In short, any fan of Krautrock, instrumental jamming, or of interesting-yet-unconventional rock music has to pick up a copy of this at some point. And, of course, it goes without saying that being a Can fan without this is simply inexcusable.

PS: I originally gave this a D rating but decided that "Soul Desert" requires me to discount the rating more than I originally did. It's still my second favorite from the band, though.

And you know what, that's a pretty remarkable achievement for an album that, for just under thirty minutes, is pretty danged close to unlistenable. This is a seven-track double album (it fits on one CD, though) that, while starting and ending on perfectly solid notes, hits a whole lot of sour notes (when they can even be called notes) in tracks five and six. Track five is a 17:22 sound collage called "Aumgn," and while I'm certainly tolerant of the kinds of noises Schmidt and Czukay (not to mention Damo, though he's not really in the forefront) fill this track with, I'm not all that sold on the seemingly directionless way in which they're presented here. Track six, entitled "Peking O," mainly features a completely unleashed Damo Suzuki, going nuts with some hyperactive verbal assaults that, if nothing else, certainly foreshadow the works of the later infamous abstract vocalization artist, The Great Cornholio. If ever Can could be accused of truly pointless experimentation, it would be in these two tracks.

On the other hand, though, while part of me certainly wants to accuse Can of this, there's also a part of me that doesn't entirely buy that accusation. Call me nuts, but as mind-boggling and even silly as these pieces might get at points, I never really get the feeling that Can are just BS'ing me and hoping to get away with it. "Aumgn," for all of its wandering wailings, has some really lovely, depressing downbeat sounds and vibes to it (listen to that first minute or so and tell me you don't get a chill or two), and while it certainly suffers from not having an underlying Jaki "thunka-thunka" driving it forward, there's at least a brief patch near the end where the drums show up to make things feel better than they had at first. And in "Peking O," well, it would be noteworthy if for no other reason than for that electronic pitter-patter drum sound that sounds exactly like what I've heard in much of the bits and pieces of 90's "electronica" and beyond (which is almost nothing, but my point stands), and anytime you can predate something that closely by 25+ years, you're going to win my respect. And, doggone it, I like hearing Schmidt playing off of Damo's wails with his electric piano, and I like hearing Damo go so wacky that he even ends up making a *bpbpbpbpbpbpbpbpbpbpb* (fingers running over lips) sound at one point. The point is, these tracks are disturbing and uncomfortable and experiments gone horribly horribly wrong, but they also contain a badly required air of competency to them, and given how they accentuate the vibes of going insane that occupy much of the rest of the album, it's hard for me to completely condemn them. I'll probably go back to skipping them when I listen to the album in the future, but I don't completely rue the time I've spent getting seriously reacquainted with them for this review.

That leaves five tracks, which are so mind-bogglingly great that they make this nearly a no-brainer D in my eyes. I used to slightly overlook the opening "Paperhouse," but I eventually repented of that. The opening, slower section may not be as immediately grabbing as the hyperactive robotic groove that the piece turns into, but it's got some really lovely piano tinklings buried in the mix if you want to listen to them. Plus, the whole track features a guitar attack that I find more and more interesting every time I listen to it; I'm continually amazed at how graceful the parts from Karoli tend to be here. Of course, it's much easier on this track (as on many Can tracks) to pay attention to the drumming and Suzuki's vocals than to anything else, and that does a good job of setting the tone for "Mushroom," which is everything great about Can poured into a single 4:08 burst. The drums sound even more lo-fi than usual, but they're no less powerful or steady or rhythmic than before, and Suzuki's alternations between low mumbling and loud wailing are arguably better structured here than anywhere else. And dig the explosion at the end, which I guess is supposed to be like the mushroom cloud on the cover, unless of course you think it looks more like a skull getting shot through.

Whatever, we then come to the amazing "Oh Yeah," which initially features backwards vocals and cymbals (but forwards driving rhythm from the drums, yessirree), covered in some of the best low key, atmospheric keyboard noises for this kind of music imaginable, before Damo snaps from the rewind button to the play button, not that it makes any difference for figuring out what he's saying. Sheesh, there's more terrific moody, jazzy, gritty guitar parts, some more of Czukay knowing exactly how much to just hold the piece together and how much to step slightly into the spotlight, and everywhere there's those drums that just seem they could go on for eternity without losing the groove. Amazing.

But not as amazing as the behemoth that comes after. I LOVED "Halleluwah" on my very first listen to it, and that initial infatuation hasn't receded one bit. Years after first listening to this (my first listen was late 2001), I'm still finding new bits to grab my attention. The drumming on here is absolutely transcendant, even by Jaki's standards; just listen to that complicated rhythm that he's keeping so rock-steady and pounding for almost the entirety of the 18+ minutes of this track, and then notice the rolls he's putting underneath it without once losing the beat in the third minute or so of the piece, and then tell me that he wasn't one of the greatest drummers on earth. And everybody else, well, they take full advantage of this foundation, even more than on the amazing "Mother Sky." More jazzy, even Spanishy-in-places guitar parts, more synth and piano breaks, some amazingly creepy violin noises for good measure, and above all there's Damo. Lessee, there's that one bit where I think he's singing about recording the other tracks on the album (the only vaguely rational explanation I can give for the fact that he's reciting titles of other songs); there's that opening "Well has anybody ever seen the snowman *something* *something* ..." bit; and of course there's the climactic wailings of "HALLELELELELELELELUWAH HALLELELELELELELELUWAH." Does this look scary on paper? Well, trust me, it would to me too, but it all sounds ridiculously awesome when you actually hear it, unless having a musical representation of a person going completely nuts can't possibly represent your idea of awesome.

The album then hits "Aumgn" and "Peking O," but just when it seems we're destined to have such a great start tainted by such a bitter taste to finish it, the band is kind enough to finish off with another classic in "Bring Me Coffee or Tea." It's like, I dunno, it's like coming out of the most wicked, nightmarish acid trip imaginable, and waking up and trying to meditate it off in a dark room. The drums here are different from the rest of the album; not hyper-rhythmic, but definitely not chaotic like on much of the last two tracks. Rather, they're just there to help with the general mood, which is primarily set by the guitars (augmented by sitars quite a bit), and Suzuki's Easternish wails in his typical manner. Imagine a slightly more intense version of "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone," with the trappings I described, and there you go.

And there you have it, one of the most incredibly screwed up, but also one of the most incredible, albums made in the 70's. The most experimental tracks can scare away even the faithful, but if you can't get into "Mushroom," "Oh Yeah" or "Halleluwah," then Can is simply not for you. Any adventerous music lover should have this.

Here's the thing, though: with the exception of two (possibly three) tracks, I can't help but get the feeling that Can, at this point in time, could have done this album in their sleep. "Sing Swan Song," for instance, may be a perfectly lovely Easternish moody ballad, but after the other moody ballads they'd done on the last two albums, something like this wasn't exactly them stretching themselves. "One More Night" actually comes pretty close to getting the dreaded "filler" tag from me; this may be a rather involved piece of proto-trance meant for background listening, but it's hard for me to treat it as more than background music regardless, even if Damo gives it an edge after a while. "I'm So Green" is a fun piece of robo-ethnic dance pop, and it's interesting to put on once in a while, but it's hardly one of Can's career highlights.

The tracks which bookend the album are both very good, to my ears, but they too don't hit me as as inspired as Can's best work. The opening "Pinch," as cool as it sounds with its jittery ethnic rhythms and its domination by Damo's voice, has a couple of things working against it to keep me from loving it. First is that, while Can has always largely been based around Jaki and Damo, here that emphasis is pressed just a bit too hard, particularly at the expense of Karoli and Schmidt. Karoli's there, but he's buried (though impressive), and even after the nth listen I can't think of any especially strong Schmidt presence. The second characteristic, then, is that I'm not really happy with the structure, or lack thereof, of the piece. "Pinch" really sounds like it could have just been somebody turning on the recording mic for a random ten minute interval in the middle of an hour-long Can jam, and while I can guess that that would make some jump for joy, it makes me a little antsy. I guess I wouldn't be bothered so much, though, if this jam wasn't so one-note in nature; "Halleluwah" and "Mother Sky" had a bazillion cool things happen in their running times, whereas this is, basically, rhythm and rambling for ten minutes. Only Damo muttering the title of the song at the end gives any sense of resolution, and in this case that bugs me. I mean, the track is awesome as background music, but if I try to treat it as serious listening music, it goes down a bit in my ears.

The closing psychedelic number, "Spoon," is closer to being a classic than the other numbers thus far listed, because it manages to sound to me like Can are both stretching themselves a bit and at the same time bothering to actually focus on melody instead of just the rhythm. So help me, I love that little verse melody Damo sings in as close to a normal voice as he can muster, and the way Schmidt's synth noises muck it up (in a good way) does nothing but good for the effect. Of course, Schmidt's "normal" keyboard parts are really nice for some reason I can't put my finger on, and the bits of electronic percussion at the beginning have a neat ethnic sci-fi cool to them, so there you go.

The crux of the album, though, lies in the middle, with a short number ("Vitamin C," 3:34) and a long one ("Soup," 10:25). "Vitamin C" sounds creepy in a way the band hadn't yet managed to pull off (which says something), as Jaki brings back the robo-rhythms to great effect, Damo pulls off a threatening delivery about the danger of Vitamin C deficiency (and man, I was so proud of myself for noticing the similarity between how Damo sings "Hey You" in the chorus and how David Gilmour would later sing it in the song of the same name seven years later, at least until I saw George Starostin had made the exact same observation. Grumble), and overall the band manages to take just enough of a step back from its usual perversity to sound cool in an almost normal way. That's a good thing, by the way, if only because of how relatively novel that is for the band; "Vitamin C" is, really, just a very good dark rock song.

"Soup," on the other hand, is Can at their most gloriously noisy and weird and varied, and provides a nice break from the feeling of sleepwalking through much of the rest of the album. The first half is fairly standard from Can, though not really for the album; it starts out quiet, then sees the band enter full screaming jam mode, with Damo bellowing way more than to that point, and with Karoli finally unleashed. And then we get the buildup of synth noises, until we get to the main attraction, which is Damo preaching his stuff over the craziest collection of processed noise that could have possibly existed in the early 70's. Maybe that's why the rest of the album sounds so tame, particularly in Schmidt's contributions; a disproportionate amount of time was probably spent on trying to get that perfect "soup-boiling-over" sound and all of those *blaaaaaaaaaare* noises and what-not.

Now, allow me to be clear; I in no way have an overall dislike for the tracks here that aren't "Vitamin C" or "Soup" (I'm giving this album a B, almost a C, for crying out loud). It's just that I can't shake the feeling that they had the capability to make a much better album here than they really did, and that feeling has only solidified in me over time. Regardless, it's a very, very, very good album, one highly recommended for all within sight of my site.

The rest of the album, though, is not quite like what we'd gotten from the band before. It's not dramatically different, of course; the main schtick of the band is still lengthy, very rhythmic instrumental jamming with Damo muttering goodness-knows-what on top from time to time. However, where Damo was critical to the sound before, here he almost sounds like an afterthought, albeit a very pleasant and nice afterthought. A similar reduction, though not as drastic, occurs in the role of Jaki; he's still the foundation of the sound, yes, but he never really stands out as the dominant feature like he often tended to in the past. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, though; "Pinch" was pretty close to a nine-minute Damo-Jaki duet, and I wasn't the biggest fan of that one, after all.

This reduction in Jaki's and Damo's roles doesn't really lead to a corresponding increase in the importance of any of the other band members individually, though (maybe Schmidt could be said to be boosted, though his presence is as much in atmosphere as in anything else). Heck, if you're looking for analogies, this could almost be considered the Murmur of the Krautrock world (yes, I know that Murmur came out a decade later), in that everybody is turned down in the mix enough for everybody to contribute to an ensemble sound that's that much stronger than the sum of its parts. This is hands down the prettiest album Can would ever make, and a wonderful tribute to the great power that can be achieved from well-placed restraint and subtlety.

It's so pretty, actually, that I can easily give it a C despite being slightly unsure of how to describe the other tracks themselves. I'll try regardless, though. The opening title track begins with all sorts of lovely (and occasionally somewhat disturbing) ambient noises, and then the drums rise up quietly and slowly, with a sort of "brushing" sound laid on top of them, and then the rest of the band slowly kicks in and Damo sings a playful melody repeatedly (after coming out of having his vocals completely encoded). There are some guitar and synth passages that sound like everything from later King Crimson to Radiohead, there are some passages where Damo sings loudly through some device that makes him sound uncannily like Mark E. Smith of The Fall would often sound later, and it just stays in an ultra-hypnotic groove that never lets up in all of its nine-and-a-half minutes.

"Spray" has the band going into a real "sci-fi" mode, with electronically-treated (I guess) "hollow" drums complementing all sorts of unnerving synth sounds and low-key guitar lines for about six minutes before something resembling a "song" pops up. The actual song part, fortunately, is nearly as good as the part leading up to it, if only because it provides a nice contrast to the relative "fury" of the first passage without entirely letting go of the tension of it. Karoli is the quiet star of this passage, but Damo gives a nice soft texture to it as well.

After the brief diversion of "Moonshake," we hit the main attraction, the twenty minute (almost on the dot) suite, "Bel Air." If you think that all Ambient music is a put-on made by uncreative lazy people (which definitely does not describe me, mind you), but are interested in at least seeing where it came from and if it ever had a resemblence to "good" music, this should definitely be one of your first stops. Suzuki puts on one of his best ever performances in terms of beauty, taking on quite a few vocal melodies, and the band complements him (well, I guess it's the other way around, whatever) with quite a few different grooves throughout. There are several stunning moments of beauty, many coming from assorted quiet Karoli lines, many from the sounds Schmidt puts out, and many just from the way it all comes together. It ... it all kinda works for me the same way "The Revealing Science of God" or "The Remembering" work for me on Yes' TFTO, but I can easily see somebody who dislikes those still enjoying these (and come to think of it, this album came out a few months before Tales, and there are a lot of synth sounds here that sound like Wakeman could have appropriated them ... hmm). One thing the piece doesn't have is any clear structure, but that works to its benefit in this case; it's set up in such a way that ever thinking "shouldn't this be ending at some point?" should not really cross one's mind, because the atmosphere it creates isn't really one that has anything to do with time or space as we know it.

Sheesh, I like this album. I actually started this review giving it an A, but despite the fact that there's, at first swipe, not an incredible amount going on, reviewing this in depth makes me realize just how odd that notion is. Were it not for the fact that this is probably best listened to as background music (some of the best background music ever written), I might give it an even higher grade.

Oh, by the way: Damo left after this album and became a Jehovah's Witness. Good for him, I guess.

The first two tracks, to be fair, are quite nice. The opener, "Dizzy Dizzy," is kinda in the same "spacey" vein as the quieter stuff on the last vein, with a bunch of violin passages sliding around a low-key, almost bouncy rhythm. The vocals, done by Karoli in a manner completely unlike anything Damo would have ever done, are mostly built around him whispering/chanting, "Got to get it-it up, got to get it-it over" again and again, punctuated by an occasional chant of the title of the song. It really matches the atmosphere of the cover, I think; I can easily see myself flying along that landscape with this in the background.

The following track, "Come Sta, La Luna," features Schmidt on vocals (he's mildly grating when he sings the title, but it kinda works here), mostly with him muttering over yet another clever, hypnotic rhythmic pattern. There's an awful lot of un-altered piano here, especially for a Can album, and it gives a feeling of depth to the sound that, in conjunction with the usual dose of odd noises, really milks the "spacey" vibe these guys are going for quite well. So far, so good.

However, we then hit "Splash," which is the first time in a while that Can sound, dare I say it, truly uninspired. What it reminds me of most, actually, is the beginning of the middle section of "Trilogy" by ELP, where Emerson spends a good couple of minutes wanking over a pattern almost identical to the one here. The violin, guitar and keyboard passages here are technically solid, yes, but for a band whose main calling card has been doing jams of a kind that nobody else in the world could properly imitate, mere technical prowess is simply not enough. It's not bad, but not particularly special. Similarly, the 11-minute "Chain Reaction" is rhythmic in a way that isn't anything new, and while all these dancey guitar lines work well with the drums in creating a proto-techno effect, and while there are some bits of vaguely melodic groove near the end, it just doesn't come together into something I can get excited about.

And then there's "Quantum Physics," which isn't nasty but sounds like an outtake from the Future Days sessions. I do like how the drums kinda move up and down in the mix (mostly staying incredibly quiet, of course), and I like the overall feel and the way the synths sound, but I'm kinda disappointed that there aren't any moments of sheer beauty like in, say, "Bel Air." It's nice and futuristic-sounding and all that, but there's just not that extra something that has made me like the band's previous work as much as I have.

Still, it's a nice enough album, just not an especially essential one. If you really, really dig on Future Days and the "cosmic" sound and atmosphere of that one, you'll want this one, and somebody looking to get into post-Damo Can will probably be best off going with this one first. Don't get your expectations up too high, though.

"Vernal Equinox" is the aforementioned heavy instrumental, and it manages to rule immensely while taking a rather different route from the kinds of instrumental work the band had done before. Whereas Jaki and Holger are relatively subdued during the rest of the album (they no longer stand out as the most robotic rhythm machine in the world), here they get to sound like, I dunno, like the Deep Purple rhythm section in a particularly good performance of the jam section of "Space Trucking" (with the added bonus that Jaki gets to spend some time playing with his futuristic proto-electronic drum sounds). In other words, really fast, and really tight. Karoli and Schmidt, meanwhile, just go absolutely nuts on this track as foils towards one another, especially Karoli (this album may arguably be his peak with the band) who gets to abrasively shred like he had never been fully given the chance to before. The album, frankly, is worth picking up if only for this track.

The opening "Full Moon on the Highway" is also an all-out success, a song that would be a fine straight-ahead rocker with wonderful guitar work and a terse vocal delivery but that also has the voices in the chorus processed into oblivion and has neat effects in the low-pitched keys. Ever wonder what 60's hard-rock would sound like if done by Germans that looked as coldly decadent as the guys appear on the front cover? This is your answer, and the answer is creepily great!

The other numbers, unfortunately, aren't anywhere near as successful as those two. "Half Past One" can't help but bother the heck out of me in that Karoli doesn't seem to realize that speaking in near-constant pitch is not the same as singing, and this attempt at sounding "moody" (I guess) like the backing track just seems like total failure to me. "Hunters and Collectors" stands out to me in that Karoli sounds eerily like a German Syd Barrett at times, which makes this weird attempt at something resembling "poppiness" kinda enjoyable, but it would never be counted as a highlight for the band. "Red Hot Indians" is notable only for the strange presence of a saxophone, and the giant atonal sound mess that is "Unfinished" probably should have stayed unreleased (gee, I'm sure nobody has ever made that pun before). There are some moments here and there that more or less work, but as a whole, it comes off as a third-rate Aumgn, and that's not a good thing.

All in all, an 8 might be too high of a grade for this, but I'm keeping the rating where it is because the two clearly good tracks are so wonderful, and the ones that aren't "Unfinished" are basically listenable. Regardless, don't sweat this if you aren't a completist.

Seven tracks, not a total duffer among them. There are a lot of reggae influences on here, especially in the closing ten-minute title track and in the wonderful (and wonderfully titled) "Laugh Till You Cry, Live Till You Die." "I Want More" (and its reprise, "... And More") makes good use of the Bo Diddley beat and crosses it with an amusing little synth puttering, creating a song that actually got Can a top-30 single. There's more pop, some atmosphere, and just a whole lot of relatively simplistic song rhythms with Karoli and Schmidt performing a bunch of moderately amusing parlor tricks. That's not an insult, so you know; the songs on this album hardly add much of historical significance to the Can legacy, but it definitely works as cheerful background for my walk to and from work, and that works for me.

In short, this isn't an album that can receive a long review, but that's more a function of being samey and not extremely memorable in terms of individual songs. It works just fine as an album, and could have been an effective swan-song had the band not gotten greedy and thought it could pull off a more "serious" approach again ...

Another lineup change occurred in making this album, one which could have been intriguing but instead is executed as badly as it probably could have been. Another former Traffic member, with the great name of Reebop Kwaku Baah, came in as, no joke, a second percussionist. Reebop was big on "ethnic" sounds and rhythms, and in theory this should have made him a perfect addition to the band and a good foil for Jaki. Unfortunately, instead of bringing out the best in Jaki, Reebop ends up completely overshadowing him, as Jaki spends most of the album in a straightup timekeeping mode (and mixed down, no less), and isn't even able to do that in a manner close to his Human Drum Machine past. In short, then, the net result of these moves is essentially that the band traded its vaunted rhythm section for part of the rhythm section of Traffic, a move I'd rate somewhere along the lines of trading a Mickey Mantle rookie card for a picture of Homer Simpson sleeping on the couch in his underwear.

When all is said and done, the low rating comes not from the lineup changes themselves, but the fact that this album basically bores the crap out of me. The opening "Don't Say No" seems to have some bouncy, rhythmic promise at the beginning, but the essence of it is very similar to "Moonshake" from Future Days, and this track does a good job of showing that it was a good idea to make its predecessor three minutes instead of almost six-and-a-half. The lyrics are unacceptably inane, the Reebop scat-singing throughout annoys the crap out of me, and not even Karoli's guitar tricks (he seems to be the only person interested in stepping up and doing anything over this endlessly tedious groove) saves things.

"Sunshine Day and Night," which follows it, is dancable, but unlike the various tracks on Flow Motion, it lacks strong enough gimmicks from Karoli and Schmidt to let me focus on something other than, "Wow, this song is almost completely empty." "Call Me" is a vague jumble of a four-note bassline repeated ad infinitum, some "atmospheric" keyboard sounds, little effective guitar, and Rosko demonstrating a horrible singing voice while tackling a rambling, totally forgettable vocal melody. And the biggie of the album, the fifteen minute "Animal Waves," does at least have a nice keyboard pattern to loop forever instead of an ugly keyboard pattern to loop forever, but seeing as everything on top of it is essentially listening to Can autopilot as they've never autopiloted before, you're not going to see me get excited. And finally, they close with a vaguely okay pop ballad thats completely unlike everything else on the album, but while I don't mind hearing it here, it's definitely not a song I'm ever going to seek out to hear ever again.

So basically, Can left me with something that I get almost no enjoyment out of, which means a low grade is certain. On the other hand, listening to it doesn't leave me with an overpowering urge to stab my ears out with a knife, unlike most of the albums I rate extremely low on this site, so a 5 seems right. Note, however, that some fans really enjoy this; Mark Prindle gave it an 8/10, for crying out loud.

The highpoint is undoubtedly the moody seven-minute instrumental "November," which uses a lot of tasteful piano to complement some great emotional guitar solos, and which also features (to my ears) something that wasn't found on the last album: a decent blend of the percussion attacks of Jaki and Reebop, where they're clearly distinct but clearly working together. It's nowhere near as good as the better instrumental work from the band's prime, but it's a marked improvement over everything from Saw, and that counts for something.

Other decent tracks include "Seven Days Awake," an instrumental which adds little to Can's legacy but is at least kind enough to be depressing, and the totally incongruous "Give Me No Roses," a bouncy Gee-sung pop number that has a neat little chorus. Unfortunately, that's only three tracks out of seven. The opening "Serpentine" reminds me too much of the kind of noodling that took up Delight (at least it's only four minutes, though), "Pauper's Daughter and I" is an incredibly obnoxious pop song that makes the mistake of lasting a whole six minutes, and the closing "One More Day" is a completely pointless two-minute "astral" instrumental. And, of course, there's "Like INOBE GOD," a piece of "ethnic" muzak with terrible Reebop vocals, the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from a cross between late-period Can and Murph and the Magic Tones (see the movie The Blues Brothers if you don't get what I'm talking about) while dining in a Holiday Inn. This is just AWFUL.

If you're a Can fanatic, hunt down the best tracks from this online. Otherwise, just pretend this never existed; you and the band will get on quite well if you do that.

The next three tracks take the band into (by now) typical territory, which of course means that the rating inevitably goes down, though at least "Sodom" has somewhat of an air of morbidity. Just when I've resigned myself to the same ole head drooping, though, the album takes the ultimate left turn. Yes, I am speaking of the band's cover of "Can-Can," a track so wrong on every level that I nearly keel over laughing every time, and that's a good thing. I can see why many fans would hate it, of course; this is the kind of thing that Mannheim Steamroller spent their whole career doing, and the kind of thing people hate ELP for bringing about in the first place. But man, this isn't something the band did on a regular basis; this is a one-time joke from a band that never showed on-the-job humor, and it's an opportunity to make complete fools of themselves that the band takes full advantage of. Oh man, Karoli doesn't even try to show any "good taste" or restraint in his guitar sounds on this, a basically note-for-note cover of the original, and it's all for the better. The last track, which is basically variations on "Can-Can," is a hoot too.

A brief review of a largely insignificant album, yes, but an album I'm not sorry to have heard. The band really had no future at this point, and it was a good thing for them to break up, but there have been far worse farewell albums in history, and I'm glad to say that I really like more than twenty minutes of this.

The Mooney-era material, taken from both the 1968 Delay 1968 era and the 1969 Monster Movie era, has especially tremendous variance in quality. On the plus side, this era contributes what may be the best track on the set: the 17-minute "Grablau," a monstrous jam sorta in the vein of "Mother Sky," with a brief vocal section in the middle so distorted and screwed up that it's impossible to tell it comes from Mooney, and which undergoes tremendous variation from start to finish. The set begins on a strong note in this era as well, thanks to a great mostly instrumental jam in the Monster Movie style (starting quiet and atmospheric before picking up speed and centering around a bassline that sounds like something out of a spy movie) called "Millionspiel." There are some other nice tracks from this era as well, such as the weirdly up-beat "Deadly Doris," the gentle guitar-centric "Oscura Primavera," and the hilarious "Midnight Sky," which sounds like Captain Beefheart doing blues rock in a slightly less screwed up way than usual for him. On the negative side, well, there's pretty much everything else from this bunch. "Waiting for the Streetcar" is quintessential bad Mooney-era Can, featuring instrumental backing that might be pretty decent but is completely obscured by the way that Mooney basically sings "Are you waiting for the streetcar?" (or close variations, with occasional other lyrics) repeatedly for ten minutes. Other Mooney-era material here is a little less stereotypical, but not much more listenable. "When Darkness Comes" and "Blind Mirror Surf" each feature a lot of ugly squealing noises without much payoff, and putting them back-to-back makes for a really difficult 12 minutes to endure. "Your Friendly Neigborhood Whore" is at least cheery and upbeat, but Mooney's ugly singing makes it no better than an average Delay 1968 number, and that means it's not very good. "True Story" is Mooney telling a story over an ugly keyboard sound for four minutes, and finally "Desert" is an early version of "Soul Desert," which was the worst song on Soundtracks by a good distance. Material like this only serves to remind me just how glad I am that Mooney left the band.

The Suzuki-era material doesn't exactly contribute a lot to the band's legacy, but it's definitely the most enjoyable era of the collection. There are fine live versions of "Spoon" (extended to 17 minutes!!), "Mushroom," and "One More Night" (here called "One More Saturday Night"), and they all show that the band's amazing jamming power during this era translated just fine out of the studio and into live performance. On the first CD, one rarity ("Evening All Day") is a bunch of go-nowhere noise-making, but another rarity, "Bubble Rap," is a great Ege Bamyasi-era track, with Damo preaching whatever over guitar growlings with an awesome strong tone and the rhythm section in peak form. Otherwise, the Suzuki material here consists of early versions of later classics (aside from the :37 of "The Agreement," which seems to be somebody talking while peeing): "Dead Pigeon Suite" is alternately beautiful, exotic and intense jamming that eventually turns into "Vitamin C"; "Abra Cada Braxas" sounds like an early version of "Bring Me Coffee or Tea"; "A Swan is Born" is an early version of "Sing Swan Song"; "On the Way to Mother Sky" is just what it says; "Messer, Scissors, Fork and Light" would eventually condense down into "Spoon." It's very interesting to hear these tracks in work-in-progress mode, and for the most part they would have been just fine even if the band hadn't refined them further, but these are hardly superior to the versions that actually made it onto the albums themselves.

The post-Suzuki material reflects the corresponding releases pretty well, in that it tends to still show a nice amount of creative spark but a little lack of focus. There's an early version of "Vernal Equinox" called "Midnight Men," and it has the basic skeleton in place but isn't quite the destroyer of worlds that "Vernal Equinox" would be. The one really long track from this era is a live performance of a track called "Networks of Foam," and what it lacks in structure it makes up in terrifying aggression and energy (Jaki and Michael, good grief), and it's definitely a keeper. The rest consists of short ideas not explored to full potential ("The Loop," "Godzilla Fragment," and "Alice," which is gorgeous and really needed a full song built around it), a short idea explored to full potential and still found wanting ("E.F.S. 108"), a gorgeous atmospheric meandering (with some singing but done so quietly that it may as well not be there) in "Private Nocturnal," and a silly funk/disco number from the Saw Delight era ("Barnacles," which probably would have been the best number on that album). Still, while this section of the set can't live up to the Suzuki section, it says something that there's clear keeper material in here.

In a way, it's fitting that this collection didn't come out until a very late date, because this is a set made for the iPod/digital library era. As irritating as a good chunk of this set may be, there's still a very nice collection as long as 2 CDs buried within here, and that material is worth keeping around. Any Can fan should acquire and hear the best material from this set, and if that means getting the full set and having a CD's worth of dead weight, then so be it, but it would be better just to hear the good stuff. And besides, indications were from Schmidt that this might be the end of viable releasable material from the band, and thus it's worth savoring these remnants of the band's career.

This isn't a particularly good album, but it isn't a bad one either, and given the choice between having to listen to all of Monster Movie or this again, I'd likely pick this one. Mooney, surprisingly, is in good form throughout; I mean, he doesn't have much of a voice, but he never goes into overboard screaming fits or into endless repeated mumbling, and that's at least something. The rest of the band basically sounds like what you'd expect Can crossed (to varying degrees) with generic 80's music to sound like. Jaki isn't his former beast self, and he's got some electronic augmentation, but heck, he had some of that in the 70's, and he doesn't sound like a hack, so he's fine. Schmidt's gotten a bit too fond of generic adult contemporary sounds (especially in the longest song on the album, "Like a New Child," which oddly enough also has some really ugly noises as well), but he gets a couple of moments where you can tell it's him. And Karoli and Czukay, well, they're what they've always been.

Since nobody really cares about track-by-track analysis for a late 80's Can album, I'll just mention a select few standouts. The opening "On the Beautiful Side of a Romance" would be better if it were shorter and didn't have so many parts where the limitations of Mooney's voice are put on full display, but it has a nice atmosphere and just a little bit of the "danger" feel of old. "The Withoutlaw Man" is an amusing piece that kinda sounds like late-90's Tom Waits, except slightly cheerier and two octaves higher (and with more guitar), "Below This Level (Patient's Song)" is a sorta jazzy-poppy sci-fi number that's definitely ... unique ... and "Hoolah Hoolah" is the best I could imagine a track being that features Mooney and backing harmonies 'singing' lines like "They do wear pants in the southern side of France." And dig the circus organs in the background!

The other tracks aren't so great, but they're not horrendous, and in the end I can safely give this a decent grade. The world could have survived had a song like "Hoolah Hoolah" never been done, but it's one of the more delightful absurdities I've taken part of in my life, and quite a bit of this album is recommendable to an eclectic. Of course, hardcore Can fans will probably hate it, and non-hardcore Can fans probably wouldn't be looking for albums like this in the first place, but whatever.