CANNIBALISM 1

Sometimes I feel like the original "anti-Can fan" ... because I really dislike this group's music. Perhaps I'd heard so many good things before I heard this band that I was bound to be disappointed ... but to me Can was a one-dimensional outfit that used monotous drums, blues guitar licks, repetitive bass lines, percussive, hypnotic keyboards and incomprehensible vocals (usual a blurred whisper but occasionally a grating shout) from either Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki to produce dull psychedelic music that doesn't match up to the work of Velvet Underground, Silver Apples or the jam-era Quicksilver Messenger Service, which are three very different bands that Can fleetingly reminds me of.

This compilation covers the period from 1969 to 1974 when Can released six albums, although oddly enough there is no material from 1973's Future Days, widely believed to among Can's best works. Quite a few of the songs have been drastically re-edited like Tago Mago's Halleluwah and Aumgn both of which had more than 10 minutes lopped off the original version. Also worth noting is that the original double LP had 14 songs but Spray and Soul Desert were dropped so that this stuff could be fit on one CD.

As far as I'm concerned this is generally poor music, with hardly any creative moments. A lot of songs like Father Cannot Yell, Soup, Mushroom and Yoo Doo Right are actually painful to have to sit through. Others like Mother Sky and the funky One More Night start off exciting but don't go anywhere. There were only a handful of songs I enjoyed ... the late-night blues of She Brings The Rain, the angry Outside My Door and the quirky Spoon ... although none of them seemed remotely progressive to me.

Ultimately though, I'm quite shocked at the lofty reputation of Can and its individual musicians like drummer Jaki Liebedeit and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt who seem to me to do the same thing all the time. ... 24% on the MPV scale

This is probably the best available one-stop, single disc introduction to the brightest star in the Krautrock constellation, but the generous rating is strictly for the uninitiated. There isn't anything new here to tempt the already confirmed fan, who at any rate should already own the entire CAN catalogue (and if not, shame on you).

The twelve-track "Cannibalism" compilation spans the first (and best) six albums released by the band between 1969 and 1974 (actually only five albums are represented: the instrumental "Spray", off "Future Days", didn't make the transition from vinyl to CD). The disc begins and ends with the first and last tracks from their debut album "Monster Movie" - a nice gesture to symmetry, but in between all bets are off. I won't attempt to describe all the varieties of style on display here; it's enough to say the twelve selected tracks could almost be the work of (at least) six different bands, united only by the intensity of their collective vision and their commitment to uninhibited musical exploration.

The music of CAN was first and foremost a 1960s phenomenon, but not the now horribly dated Haight-Asbury psychedelic Summer of Love variety. Theirs was a decade of social and political turmoil, reflected here in a 75-minute sampling of sometimes uneasy listening, crude and creative as only the best Krautrock can be. So the gentle, bluesy ballad "She Brings the Rain" follows the ear-bending aural pile driver of "Mother Sky", before leading into the hallucinogenic tribal funk of "Mushroom", and then to the skewed metronome pop precision of "One More Night".

Scattered in between are a few listener-friendly excerpts from their more free-form outer limit improvisations, drastically abbreviated from their original album versions, and sounding a little lost when taken out of context. The epic 18+ minute "Halleluwah" suffers most, with a mere five minute extract giving no clues to the accumulative power of the "Tago Mago" album jam, which filled an entire side of vinyl.

Wisely, the monumental "Yoo Doo Right" (from the aptly titled "Monster Movie" album) was left intact. This is CAN at their primitive, embryonic best, and it's the perfect litmus test for new listeners undecided about exploring the band in depth. If you can handle a repetitive two-note bass riff for twenty (yes, twenty) minutes, layered with jungle percussion and hair-curling, distorted electric guitar, and topped off by a typically raw, unconventional vocal performance by Malcolm Mooney (turning a girlfriend's letter into a schizophrenic rant), then you might be ready to enter the greater brotherhood of true CAN fandom.

This compilation in no way replaces or even supplements the original albums. Try it as a sampler, and if sufficiently intrigued by all means continue on to the unabridged albums, if you dare.

[One quick note: this entire CD is also included in the two-disc "Can Anthology" collection, an even better bargain for curious newcomers, with a much wider range of material and a few non-album rarities for diehard collectors. And a petty complaint: the re-arrangement of tracks here from the original vinyl compilation, together with the removal of two songs to fit it onto a single CD, makes a mess out of the credits, which were never edited to match the changes. So Damo Suzuki does not sing on tracks 4 or 7 as shown (that's Malcolm Mooney); and Mooney doesn't sing on tracks 2, 8, or 14: the first is an instrumental, the second features Suzuki, and there is no track 14. Hopefully the upcoming Spoon Records re-mastered edition will fix the typos.]

Now if I am correct, this title seems to be a CD edition of the former double LP "Cannibalism" issued in 1978. I will not repeat what I said about the former, but obviously this album is even less prominent: "because of timelimit the tracks SPRAY and SOUL DESERT of double album CANNIBALISM are missing on this CD". So, all the criticism I expressed in the former review is retained here, and the missing "Spray" makes the album "Future Days" totally unrepresented. In light of subsequent appearance of "Anthology" 2CD collection, "Cannibalism I" CD can hardly be recommended to anyone but fierce completists.

Am I the only one here who is at least a little bit put off by the label "Krautrock" for this German branch of prog? Oh well.

This collection, as others have noted, is a fine introduction to the band Can. It contains selections from most of their early albums, and gives a pretty good idea of what this band was all about. To me, it seems to have that essence of experimentalism that other bands, like Frank Zappa & The Mothers on "Freak Out", and many British bands, like the Syd Barrett Pink Floyd, Giles, Giles & Fripp, etc. were into a few years previously. This doesn't make it bad. In fact, it's quite listenable, once you get used to it.

The best thing to me is the rhythm section. While none of the musicians here appear to be virtuosos, Jaki Liebezeit's drums and Holger Czukay's bass are intriguing enough to keep my interest.

On the down side, the repetition in the 20-minute plus "Yoo Doo Right" gets downright tedious.