Can – The Singles
Mute/Spoon Records, vinyl/cd/download
Can, typically for a so-called Krautrock band, rejected Germany’s saccharine post-war music scene known as schlager, with its Euro-kitsch crooning, and evolved a trance-inducing, drum-driven dancefloor groove that borrowed as much from North African music as Karlheinz Stockhausen and the American minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley. It is difficult now to imagine how startlingly new Can must have sounded.
The band’s abidingly great 1972 album, Ege Bamyasi, showed an Andy Warhol-like image of tinned Turkish food on the cover, and was very far removed from the tepid, well-mannered prog rock of Genesis, Yes and other British stadium behemoths. Like their compatriots Faust, Neu! and Cluster, the Cologne-based Can eschewed not only the pseudo-hippie kitsch of Genesis but also the mellow denim heaven of Linda Rondstadt, the Eagles and other American middle-of-the-roadsters.
