Can-Saw Delight

Album number eight from this German band. A mainstay of the Krautrock genre, this one came out in 1977. I had never heard of Can in the 70’s but bought a few of their CDs in the 90’s. In 2014 their records were remastered and reissued, and I now own seven of them plus a three record live album I bought two years ago. They had been recording as a quartet since singer Damo Suzuki left in 1974. For this record they added Roscoe Gee and Rebop Kwaku Baah who had been in the last incarnation of Traffic. Their influence added a more World music and African rhythms to their sound. The three songs on side one, all around six minutes long, are all pretty good. The sixteen minute track on side two, “Animal Waves”, has some spacey synth sounds and a strange sounding voice at one point. The final track “Fly By Night” is some kind of Pop song that doesn’t sound like Can at all. Probably my least favorite of their records I own. They put out two more records after this, the last released after they had already broken up. The band had a falling out with Gee over songwriting credits on two songs from the next record Out Of Reach and didn’t like the direction the band was going. Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, Irmin Schmidt and Hulger Czukay re-united with original singer Malcom Mooney in 1989 for one more album.

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