Can - Ege Bamyasi (1972) (Japan Remastered 2005)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Artist: Can
Album: Ege Bamyasi
Released: 1972 (Remastered 2005)
P-Vine (PCD-22204)
Genre: Kraut-Rock
Ground and Sky. After Tago Mago, Can began the transition from Velvets-inspired free-groovers to something like James Brown-inspired impressionists. While this may not seem like the kind of distinction worth burning brain cells on, it is significant when you consider where this kind of music went — namely to the dancefloor, via the mix tapes of DJs everywhere.
While beat had always been the center of Can's microcosmic sound, this album was like a radical of that small universe. It appears that they took what they had learned on the previous album (chiefly, that Stockhausen and dance patterns can co-exist), found a low common denominator, took the fat off the top, and commenced to write the book on experimental funk. If that all sounds a little, well, mathematic to you, it probably should. As much as the band were capable of composition through improvisation, and discovery through exploration (an ability doubtlessly cribbed from the late-60s, early 70s Miles records), they were the prog masters of sound manipulation and tape edits. That means that no matter how they got somewhere, here, we only got the barest derivative of their journey. Briefly, Ege Bamyasi is Can simplified.
The whole thing leads off with "Pinch", which is probably the best Miles tribute ever recorded by a prog band. Uptempo, free-form funk, with something of a chorus every now and then. So this was how it was going to be, huh? Stark, bare, relentless, funky, slightly bizarre. Damo Suzuki continues his travels into lands with no concept of the traditional vocal, and couldn't stop influencing lo-fi freaks if he tried.
Other tunes are closer to (gasp) conventional. "One More Night", "Vitamin C", "I'm So Green", and "Spoon" are all variations on the metronome theory, as brought to us by Jaki Liebezeit. Take a groove skeleton, admire it, sprinkle some harmony around the edges, get lost in said groove skeleton, follow strange detours courtesy of narrative navigator Suzuki, watch as groove disappears into nirvana. If the avant-garde was ever so inviting, I haven't heard it.
While this album pointed the way by which Can would travel on subsequent albums, it did retain enough of their experimental edge to ward off ambient/trance comparisons. The music here is often repetitive, but it isn't exactly soothing (in, say, the same manner as "Future Days" or "Bel Air Suite"). The rhythms seem more tightly wound than usual, and the newfound sense of brevity brings an angular touch to the music where later pieces would be rounded. I guess you could call it a "tense" Can album, but I prefer "focused", and in the end, that's the term I think of when Can comes to mind.
Amazon. By the time of 1972's Ege Bamyasi, Can had consolidated, with singer Damo Suzuki fully entrenched as the unstable Michael Mooney's replacement. Suzuki's vocals range from shrieks to inaudible chanting, tackling subjects as mundane as "your vitamin C" while implying an archetypal depth. Evidence of a band at the height of their interactive powers is here. Anchored by the "percussion and flexation" (as he's credited) of Jaki Liebezeit, Can delivers seven pounding sermons of rhythmic prowess, peaking with the 10:30 sound storm of "Soup." Liebezeit's long drum riff in "Pinch"--pegged by a resounding bass thoom at the end of each repetition--creates an ellipse in which feedback bursts, guitar and keyboard note clusters, and Damo's vocal witchery combine into a perfectly balanced, loping cyclone, with each element beautifully playing off the next. Like Miles's On the Corner, Ege Bamyasi is a definitive statement on merging jazz ideology with the surging menace of rock & roll.
Pitchfork. Ege Bamyasi drops the haze and hits with a sharp pang from the get-go. Often described as the "tense" Can album, Ege Bamyasi is actually the band at its most focused, bolstered in part by the surprisingly good performance of the single "Spoon". The proto synth-pop (or synth-rock) song was used as the theme to a popular German television show, and made enough money for the band that they could afford a better recording environment and a chance to do justice to their ideas. "Pinch" is reminiscent of concurrent Miles Davis; a tough, dissonant take on rock, always kept sparse enough as to be unsettling. Likewise, "One More Night" was dry and efficient in the extreme, though, musically having more in common with Steve Reich than Davis. "Sing Swan Song" was Can's best ballad, while "Vitamin C" is still the best funk ever to come out of Europe. The band would refine their sound even more in coming years, but they wouldn't really ever get better than this. Rating: 9.8
Tracklist:
1. Pinch (9:31)
2. Sing Swan Song (4:49)
3. One More Night (5:36)
4. Vitamin C (3:32)
5. Soup (10:32)
6. I'm So Green (3:06)
7. Spoon (3:04)
Line-Up:
Holger Czukay (bass)
Michael Karoli (guitar)
Jaki Liebezeit (drums)
Damo Suzuki (vocals)
Irmin Schmidt (keyboards
|
