Posts Tagged ‘Can’

Album of the Day: Can – Tago Mago (40th Anniversary Edition)

Posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2011

Lovingly pinched from Pitchfork: Can have long been one of those bands that are more talked about than heard. They were enormously influential on certain kinds of forward-thinking rock artists (their fingerprints are all over Radiohead and the Flaming Lips, not to mention more more recent underground acts like Woods and Implodes); their records have never been out of print for long. But they’ve got a big, disorderly discography, and they don’t really have any signature songs (the Can tracks that pass for pop– ‘Spoon’, ‘I Want More’, and not many others– are alarmingly unlike the rest of their work).

They’re also tougher to “get” than a lot of their contemporaries: They specialized in long, jam-heavy rock grooves, and they had (two different) aggressively difficult vocalists, as well as a guitarist (the late Michael Karoli) who liked to noodle way up in the treble range. So where do you start?

You couldn’t do much better than beginning with 1971′s Tago Mago, freshly reissued in a “40th Anniversary Edition” (whose main difference from previous editions is the addition of a live disc from the following year). It’s a colossus of an album, the product of a band that was thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music could be.

The core of Can was four German musicians from wildly different backgrounds– when they initially came together in 1968, two of them had studied with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, one had played jazz, and one was a teenage guitar whiz. They recorded soundtrack music and a few straightforward rock songs early on, but what they were really interested in doing was going beyond kinds of music for which they had language.

Continue reading: Can: Tago Mago [40th Anniversary Edition] | Album Reviews | Pitchfork.

Tags: Album of the day, Can, Douglas Wolk, pitchfork, Tago Mago
Posted in 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended | No Comments »

Lurker’s Guide To: Progressive Rock

Posted on Monday, July 18th, 2011

Antiquated connotations surround the term, yet the words themselves suggest an inexorable march towards attaining some sort of artistic recognition for a style of music regularly associated with troublesome teenagers. Through pomp, pretence and prodigious talent, the pioneers of this maligned strain of rock achieved incredible heights of creativity. But ...read more