It looks like we’ve got a Duo of Krautrock getting served up, with this album and the next one. I really liked the previous Can offering (Tago Mago). This one is just a single LP, of four tracks.
Three of them – Future Days and Spray (8-9
minutes each on Side One) and Bel Air (the whole 20 minutes of Side Two) are
extended and sparsely instrumented ambient pieces – I think I mentioned The Orb
on the last Can album; it’s a bit like that. The drums are light but maintain a
space rock kind of beat throughout, over which float delicate guitar shapes, percussion,
sound effects, and Damo Suzuki’s lilting vocals. Future Days even features a
clear vocal, a repeated refrain of “Future Days” much like John Coltrane’s A
Love Supreme.
Moonshake is a shorter piece, a more
radio-friendly track with a Latin beat and actual lyrics; it’s a nice track,
but feels a little lost amid the extended spacy compositions, like it had
wandered in from the wrong album. Perhaps here is where Tago Mago had the edge
of being one disc of the easier song tracks and one of the sound collage
tracks.
The tracks here are certainly easier to
listen to than, say Augm on Tago Mago, a lot less “musique concrete” and maybe
more like an acoustic version of fellow Germans Tangerine Dream. I really liked
it, and I’m even more baffled why my university house mates didn’t know of
them, they fit everything for the kind of music that we all listened to back
then. It’s also really easy music for having on the background, which would
have made it a good studying soundtrack.
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