LIVE IN CUXHAVEN 1976

Live in Cuxhaven 1976 was the third archival Can live album to be released, following two epic 90 minute sets from Stuttgart and Brighton dating from 1975. This is a very different beast indeed, capturing 30 minutes of the core quartet in Lower Saxony shortly before the release of Flow Motion.

As usual the individual tracks are numbered, and all four last between six and a half and eight and a half minutes. Eins seems to start in mid flow - presumably the bootlegger forgot to press 'record' until the band had been playing for a couple of minutes - and the sound and feel very much point the way forward to Flow Motion. Zwei is a little more spacy and a little less funky, while Drei offers a somewhat deconstructed version of Dizzy Dizzy. Vier is the closest we get to the unfettered monster jams heard on previous concert recordings, with Karoli in particular cutting loose with some blistering axe work. There is then a brief announcement that the band will take a break. If there were any 20 minutes plus spontaneous compositions in the second set, either they weren't recorded or, for whatever reason, Irmin Schmidt and Mute have decided not to share them with us.

What we get on this album is a tighter, more focused iteration of Can; the interplay is dazzling, but in general the music feels more polished and less manic. The sound quality is excellent throughout, and it feels more like a budget official live album than a cleaned up bootleg; clearly, the recording technology available to bootleggers had improved in the mid to late 1970s. Vinyl aficionados will be pleased that it's an affordable single album pressed in blue; if you haven't got a turntable it's available as a reasonably priced download. It's a worthy addition to the ongoing series of live albums, and demonstrates that Can on stage still had the fire that was sometimes missing from their later releases, but it's distinctly non-essential.