CAN: LANDED (1975)
1) Full Moon On The Highway;
2) Half Past One; 3) Hunters And Collectors; 4) Vernal Equinox; 5) Red Hot
Indians; 6) Unfinished.
As public enthusiasm slowly dissipates over
Can's gradual slipping into «accessible» patterns, my hope that eventually
these mid-Seventies' albums will get their due only increases. Nowhere near as
groundbreaking as Tago Mago or Future Days, sure; but in some special
way, Landed still gives you a unique
sound — Can crossing their experience, inborn talent, and experimentation with more
conventional rock and funk rhythms of the day. Don't let brief lazy
descriptions like «Landed marks the
band's turn towards glam rock and early disco» form an incorrect impression
before you even hear the album — if all
glam rock and disco sounded like ʻFull Moon On The Highwayʼ and ʻHunters And
Collectorsʼ, we could just as well eliminate any formal difference between
nightclubs and highbrow art colleges.
Actually, Can were part of the common
progressive trend that few people back then managed to (or even tried to) avoid
— they just happened to be less lucky than, say, Kraftwerk, who'd also went
from frenetic avantgarde experimentation to «catchy pop» in a matter of several
years, but somehow managed not only to preserve, but even to enhance their
critical reputation in the process. It was easier for Ralf and Florian,
though, because with records like Autobahn
and Man Machine they were creating a
completely new sub-genre of pop music, whereas Can found themselves in a more
difficult position: any sacrifice of their «excesses» (track length, tape
splicing, crazy vocalizing, complex time signatures, etc.) would inevitably
bring them back to their well-tattered roots — good old blues-rock. Would there
be any fun in that?
Well, I'd say that Landed is still a lot of fun. ʻFull Moon On The Highwayʼ makes this
album the first one in Can's catalog to be introduced with a «potentially
commercial» three-minute pop-rock song, but it is still unmistakeably Can — largely
due to scorching acid fire guitar solos from Karoli, because the rhythm section
of Liebezeit and Czukay prefers to exercise restraint (although I still like
whatever Holger is doing with that bass, especially in the coda where he seems
to be turning that «disco» pattern inside out). The vocals, handled by Czukay
on this track, are louder and more self-assured than anything sung on Babaluma, and the sped-up chorus vocals
sound less like the proverbial chipmunks than like a pack of merry sprites
levitating over the proverbial highway. If you ever wanted to put together a
rock opera on highway travel, make sure to put this one right after Deep
Purple's ʻHighway Starʼ — there's no cooler transition from bright daytime,
with the protagonist exuding self-confidence and arrogance, to creepy
nighttime, when spirits take flight and driving becomes a test for the spirit.
The other tracks also have that night-time
sheen to them, much of this having to do with the band's final mastering of
state-of-the-art recording technologies (for the first time, they had access to
16-track recording!), so that some of the action is taking place «in the
background» and some «in the foreground», creating cool sonic dimensions — not
to mention that ʻHunters And Collectorsʼ "all come out at night", and
ʻVernal Equinoxʼ has the root nox in
the title. ʻVernal Equinoxʼ, in particular, is a highlight, the album's busiest
instrumental with lots of wailing pleasure from Karoli's guitar (no less than
three different tones, too) and occasional ultra-speedy bursts from the rhythm
section (although the electronic drums are probably programmed, but Czukay's
bass zoops are most certainly not).
On the whole, even if the individual songs
aren't nearly as catchy as they should be, I love the atmosphere — Landed sounds like one big supernatural
dance party around some sort of elemental bonfire, and as much as it borrows
from contemporary R&B, it ends up converting everything into ritualistic
wildness, largely due to clever mixing techniques. This makes the transition
into the final track, honestly titled ʻUnfinishedʼ, all the more natural — this
is where rhythm dies out, but ritualistic wildness remains, as the track begins
similarly to one of the spooky freakouts on Tago Mago and eventually, after a long and dangerous journey
through sonic tornadoes, earthquakes, and beastie-infested underground
caverns, ends up somewhere in the otherworldly domain of Future Days, populated with Yellow
Submarine characters. Okay, so maybe this description makes the
composition more interesting than it actually is, but as far as Can noisefests
go, this one is pretty inspired — and has a gorgeous little impressionist coda
that old man Debussy would probably have thumbed up for me.
In the meantime, I'm going to have to do on my
own and issue this an autonomous thumbs up all by myself. Actually, maybe the best
thing about these mid-period Can albums is that they are rarely boring — you'd
think that the band should have gotten less superficially exciting and stuck in
its own juice as it went on, but they never forget about the fun quotient, unlike some of their
stuffier Krautrock contemporaries like Faust, for example. And when fun and
experiment go hand in hand, it's the best kind of fun and the best kind of
experiment that may be had.
I never knew or heard anything about Can before its appearance in this OS blog, now I'm a belated fan.
ReplyDeleteI like that George appreciates the "fun" quality of their mid-seventies stuff. Tago Mago was a true mind-blower for me, but not in an altogether good way. I guess that's why the kind of fun that Can has in this period is less annoying than it could have been -- the fun seems pretty well-earned.
Also, very insightful of GS to frame the album as a worthy soundtrack for the thinking man's road trip.
Can is one band that perfectly understands the spirit of <> -- unlike, for instance, Journey.
<> = journey. Way to ruin my punchline auto-correct algorithm.
DeleteI just picked this one up, and yes, it's no Tago Mago or future days, but it’s still very good! As with “Babaluma” and “Flow Motion”, the vocals aren’t as good as with Mooney or Suzuki, but the German accent adds an interesting quirk to it.
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