Pitchfork

Are we there yet? After 25 years of critical reappraisal and at least 15 years of indie and post-rock bands flaunting their influence, has Can finally gotten their just desserts? I don't think so. Not just yet. Can still seem just a little bit ahead of the curve. They really were "post-rock," as opposed to just futuristic. Can's music anticipated both the musical trend toward decontextualization via electronics, post-production, and editing, and the cultural trend toward collective experience and shared information. Other bands shone as brightly in this regard (The Beatles, for one), but Can arrived as a more finished product and more capable of translating their ideas onto record than any other. And they jammed: Any randomly picked moment from "Yoo Doo Right" or "Halleluwah" is as powerful now as when it was released. You can use them as make-out music, a drug soundtrack, or just stuff to listen to while driving. You can use them to blast off or come down.

Can formed in 1968, featuring two former students of avant-garde classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a former free-jazz drummer interested in math, a rock'n'roll guitarist 10 years younger than the others, and an American sculptor living in Europe in order to evade the draft. Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt had visited America in 1966, hooking up with the Fluxus musicians (Terry Riley, La Monte Young, et al.) and becoming inspired to form a rock band. He and bassist Holger Czukay (who would issue 1969's Canaxis, which used primitive sampling technology) were keen to incorporate experimental composition and compositional theories into a rock setting, and when Czukay's student Michael Karoli turned them onto Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, the band's fate was sealed.

However, Can would not become just another band. For one, they eschewed the idea of a frontman or long solos. Each member of the group served a specific function, but the band operated as a collective; no individual part was more important than the whole. They recorded music in a manner befitting a modern electronic artist, editing together tracks using source material culled from marathon improv sessions. This is also similar to what Miles Davis was doing at the time on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, though while the trumpeter was jumping into uncharted territory for a jazz musician, Can had already memorized their instruction manuals and covered more artistic and technical ground faster than any band had ever done.

But then, Can's music transcends those kinds of props: They made music that felt at turns desolate, euphoric, tense, and blissful. They were the best possible result of intellect and inspiration in rock, and these four remastered CDs argue they are as "important" as any band you could name. Their sound is very much improved. For one, there is no hiss (!) and the EQ is much better than the previously available CD versions (Can liked bass). They also come with liner notes by The Wire's David Stubbs; although his essays don't contain a lot new info, they'll be of interest to anyone who hasn't read much about Can.

Monster Movie was released in 1969, and is Can's most rock-oriented album by a considerable margin. Its songs are raw and aggressive-- very much informed by The Velvet Underground's larval trance-rock-- and they mark Malcolm Mooney as nothing if not an inspired amateur. "Father Cannot Yell" leaps out of the gate with a hi-speed keyboard flutter and the snap of Jaki Liebezeit's snare. Although the band would later perfect a kind of ambient funk, here they were brawny (though precise), determined rockers to the hilt; five minutes into "Father Cannot Yell", the song climaxes with a blaze of bass, drums, and fuzzed-out guitar, and an entire legacy of minimalist rock (from Neu! to Comets On Fire) is predicted. Of course, the 20-minute "Yoo Doo Right" is the centerpiece, and gives the best indication of what Can would do afterward. The murky, primal atmosphere of drums that dominates the track never allows the listener to escape the band's propulsion; like much of Can's best music, "Yoo Doo Right" seduces me into hypnosis, and winds through a seemingly endless array of textures and variations. Monster Movie is an amazing debut, but would be Mooney's last. He suffered a nervous breakdown onstage and returned to America.

Before beginning work on their second album, Can released the compilation Soundtracks, containing music they'd done for films. Soundtracks was released mainly to capitalize on the success of the band's debut in their native Germany, and is often overlooked by listeners expecting only throwaways and outtakes. In truth, most (but not all) of the songs don't extend the same artistic reach as those on either Monster Movie or the subsequent records, but they're hardly throwaways. In particular, "Mother Sky" has an intensity matching anything on the debut, and new vocalist Damo Suzuki's presence lends the tight-lipped drone a sedated, half-gone feel that only advances its tranced-out cause. "Tango Whiskeyman" and "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone" are short, beat-dominated variations on Can's version of pop, while "She Brings the Rain" (featuring Mooney) cuts out the drums entirely in favor of jazzy torch balladry. Can would later compile a more satisfying collection of non-LP material (1974's Limited Edition, expanded to Unlimited Edition two years later), but Soundtracks is a good sampling of their more straightforward experiments.

1971's Tago Mago saw Can stretching out into the beyond, and it was their first full-length studio record to feature Suzuki. Originally released as a double-LP, Tago Mago confirmed what "Yoo Doo Right" had only suggested: Can knew trance-rock as if they'd invented it. However, unlike it did on Monster Movie, the band didn't necessarily lull you into hypnosis via bass and beats. "Aumgn" and "Peking O" are the most experimental tracks in the Can catalog, sharing more in common with the irreverent electronic music of Stockhausen or Pierre Henry than most anything related to rock-- Ummagumma was a possible exception. Their often-bizarre arrays of sound effects and reverb-drenched, murky guitar sprawl have driven more than one listener to put down the pipe. Of course, when the epic "Halleluwah" starts with Liebezeit's industrial strength funk pattern before winding through dark, echo-chamber ambience and minimalist drone (while never letting you forget those drums), the detours seem a lot less harrowing. The shorter songs, like the gray, faintly ominous "Paperhouse" or the flawless funk and dark impressionism on "Mushroom", are merely smaller pieces of the band's most exotic pie.

The following year's 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.