Can: Ege Bamyasi

If Can's Tago Mago hadn't completely blown me away, I wouldn't have given Ege Bamyasi a second listen. That's how much I hated it the first time I heard it. But I did listen again, and then I gave it a third listen, and a fourth... and I still hated it.

Eventually, I listened on some great headphones. I heard some nice production tricks and experimental ideas buried in the background. Nice production tricks do not make a great album.

After my sixth listen, I gave up and wrote this review. Needless to say, I'm unimpressed.

Music:
Tago Mago is a complicated and challenging album that undeniably rocks. It is one of the best CDs I've checked out from EPFL.

Ege Bamyasi sounds like its dumb little brother.

I'm surprised, because every review I've read says Ege Bamyasi is a great album, 5 stars, perfect introduction to Can, yada yada yada. I don't hear it, though. The band sounds disengaged and uninterested. The songs don't do anything or go anywhere. The improvisation is dull, and the composition is uninspired. It sounds as if Can couldn't decide between being accessible or experimental, so they compromised at some boring point in the middle.

"Sing Swan Song" has the same introspective naval-gazing blandness that characterizes too much of Radiohead's music from the past decade. "One More Night" sounds like a Fela Kuti jam with no fire or passion. "Soup" starts with another dull jam, then inexplicably disintegrates into five minutes of noise that has nothing to do with the first five minutes of the song. (For what it's worth, those five minutes of noise are the most interesting thing on the album, but even they devolve into the kind of generic free-form improvisation that marked the third-rate followers of people like Ornette Coleman and... well... Can.)

The last two songs, "Spoon" and "I'm So Green," are the best on the album. Both are very short and very poppy ("Spoon" was a top 40 hit in Germany), but what's really interesting is hearing how those two songs laid the foundation for the Madchester scene that popped up about 15 years later. It's easy to listen to "I'm So Green" and imagine the Stone Roses or Primal Scream playing it.

Packaging:
Great. Another essay by David Stubbs. This one is filled with gems like, "It was all part of Can's flight from occidental hegemony in rock music." Yeah, man... rock's occidental hegemony really pisses me off.

(For those of you who don't possess a Stubbsian vocabulary, an "occidental hegemony in rock music" basically means that all the rock bands of Europe and America were oppressing the poor, struggling rock bands from the rest of the world. Apparently, when Ege Bamyasi was recorded back in '72, Can was pissed off about the way the IFWR [the International Foundation of Western Rock] was secretly conspiring to crush all of the great Asian, African, and Eastern European rock bands that were on the verge of stripping the evil patriarchal Western Rock Gods of their power.)

Hey Stubbs: how's about I plant my foot in your occidental ass, motherfucker?

Anyway, the liner notes contain Stubbs' essay and a bunch of pictures of the band. The pictures are mildly interesting. The essay isn't. End of story.

Listen if you like: Radiohead's Kid A and/or Amnesiac, early Pink Floyd, Boris, experimental music that's not too experimental.

If it were food, it'd be: canned vegetables

Can: Tago Mago

Can is one of those bands that always lurked on the periphery of my musical awareness, but never received my undivided focus. I knew they were early innovators of experimental rock music. I knew that bassist Holger Czukay recorded some beautiful instrumental albums with David Sylvian. I knew I should listen to them, but I just never got around to it.

Now that I've checked out Tago Mago from EPFL, I know what I've been missing. This is a difficult album, but it is completely unique and undeniably awesome.

Music:
On first listen, I guessed that Tago Mago came out somewhere in the mid 1970s, when punk innovators like Wire and Television were proving that you didn't need mad technical chops to create vital and relevant musical experimentation.

I was way off. Can's first album came out in '69, and Tago Mago was released in 1971.

I can't even begin to describe what this sounds like. It's rock music, but it embodies the spirit of punk and the spontaneity of jazz. It's adventurous and experimental, even for a time when the musical world was filled with the adventurous experiments of artists like Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground. It's chaotic, but it holds together without ever exploding.

This is punk before punk existed. This is jazz without the stodgy elitism. This is rock without the constraints that normally define rock. This is, quite simply, everything that makes the greatest punk and jazz and rock so damned exciting.

Packaging:
I haven't read much of British rock critic David Stubbs' writing, but if his essay here is typical of his style, he should be banished to the dark recesses of romance novels and open-mic poetry. His words epitomize the pseudo-intellectualism that makes people despise music journalists. For example:

"There's a moment here when, so in synch are the band that the song actually levitates."

No, jackass, the song did not actually levitate. Your inability to use proper punctuation or sentence structure, however, did make my blood pressure rise.

Anyway. Stubbs' commentary on the album is rotten, but the essay by Primal Scream vocalist Bobby Gillespie clearly demonstrates a love for Can's music, and his story about jamming with 2/5 of Can is genuinely exciting. Best of all, he doesn't resort to any Stubbs-isms like "beetling basslines" or "impassioned vocals creating a mist of condensation."

(Here's some obscure music trivia I figured out from reading the liner notes: The name of the band The Mooney Suzuki comes from the surnames of original Can vocalist Malcolm Mooney and his replacement, Damo Suzuki.)

Listen if you like: Kraftwerk, Sonic Youth, Miles Davis' fusion experiments from the late '60s and early '70s, Zappa, Pink Floyd's early records, Wire, Television.

If it were food, it'd be: One of my co-workers turned me on to the fact that Huy Fong's Sriracha hot sauce is delicious with pretty much everything, including pizza, popcorn, veggie dogs, mac & cheese, and even peanut butter sandwiches. Tago Mago is like the unholy combination of Sriracha and peanut butter: it shouldn't make any sense, but it's utterly fantastic.