Customer Reviews

Ege Bamyasi (Reis)

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Tago Mago, 1971, is widely and justly throught of as Can's masterwork: a sprawling double album of funk and expermentation.

Yet this disc is in some ways more intense: the songs are shorter, the funk has more bite, the nuances are darker, and the avant gaurde section of the album, "soup," --filled with Damo's demonic scatting and some amazing electronic doom--is far more dence and edgey than any work Can had previously done.

This is an album that truely tears apart your system and then puts it back together.

So never make the mistake of thinking if you own Tago you have all the Can you need. No, not by a long shot.

Few bands can boast a sound that's as original, distinctive and influential as Can's heyday albums. 1971's "Tago Mago" was Can's superb surge into the limelight, but side two's incessant sonic attack makes it hard to digest, and at times feels a little dated. "Ege Bamyasi" on the other hand is concise, pure and unadulterated Can. More direct, yet maintaining all the funky, darkly psychedelic overtones that makes up their signature sound. As always the foundations are laid down by drummer extraordinaire Jaki Liebezeit, evident immediately with the ferocious rhythmic throat-clearing of "Pinch". "Vitamin C" and "I'm So Green" are a master class in psychedelic funk, extremely physical, raw and energetic and both showcasing Damo Suzuki at his wild best. While "Ege Bamyasi" lacks the flamboyant avant-garde ramblings of "Tago Mago", there is room for experimentation within the extended "Soup", which ends in a flourish of dizzying ambience. And then there's the centre-point, the gloriously sombre and brooding "Sing Swan Song", quite possibly my favourite Can. "Ege Bamyasi" is an album rightly heralded as a pinnacle to the krautrock and 70s experimental movement. Highly recommended.

Hearing Ege Bamyasi for the first time, more than 30 years after its initial release, cut though years of jaded rock fandom. It brought back the same tangy shock of discovery I felt when I first heard the Velvet Underground, or saw bands like Magazine, Patti Smith, and the Sex Pistols on late-night TV, and started buying records in the first place.

It's of the same bold but accessible experimentalism of Miles Davis's early fusion, the minimalist art-rock of the Velvets, and the hypnotic trance-rock of the post-punk bands it predated by nearly a decade. In its spiky grooves, its backdrop of atmospheric sounds, and the odd murmurings of Damo Suzuki is something as ageless as a primitive tribal ritual.

Where as the band's previous epic "Tago Mago" is best experienced in one sitting, "Ege Bamyasi" is much more of a song orientated album, or dare I say the Can version of a pop album. While the songs are still pieced together from grueling jams by bassit/sound engineer Czukay, they are mostly of average length with a great deal of attention put into establishing distinguishable verses, hooks, and a memorable chorus. The overall sound is very urban with a dark funk rock feel running throughout the album. World music influences are also much more dominant than ever before with the melodies and grooves having a very exotic quality. As before, Jaki Liebezeit's masterful drumming is the back bone of the rhythm based band as he lays out funky grooves that seem to be both involving and trance inducing. You could easily dance to these songs as you could space out and stare into the cosmos.

One of a kind vocalist, Damo continues his oddball stream of conscious improv in barely comphrensible languages and voices. Despite the spontaneous and dangerous nature of his performances he is mostly smooth and sultry on this outing. His unique vocals are usually what stands out the most but keyboardist Schmidt can't be overlooked with his talent for creating subtle but ear anchoring melodies. Karoli's lack of guitar heroics and big riffs further distances the group from the world of rock as he often just accents the songs with his distant noodlings.

The busy "Pinch" is a strange chaotic jam in which none of the memebers ever seem to take spotlight over the other introducting the group not as seperate musicians but a single living organism of music. The whispering orient kissed, "Sing Swan Song" is a soothing warm bath of a ballad while the cold "One More Night" grooves with a dark robotic nightclub beat. One of the more pop savy songs, "Vitamin C" swaggers with aggressive paranoid beats before erupting with one of the greatest chorus hooks of all time. The longest track, "Soup" explodes with blasts of violent Funk before heading into a lengthy exploration of the more trippy territory that recalls the nightmarish B-Side of "Tago Mago". The addictive "I'm So Green" break dances with cool, catchy, laid back funk before the suspenseful but hook laden "Spoon" closes the album with what sounds like the soundtrack to a suspenseful car chase. While more approachable than "Tago Mago," "Ege Bayamsi" is still a seriously strange brand of wierd German funk rock. While the band seemed to be flirting with a easier on the ears approach they still sound like they came from another planet. Still, the album is undeniably addictive with grooves and stylish hooks that still hold up as some of the freshest ever laid down.

Another classic album from the most important band that there ever was and will be. While Tago Mago is a band hitting their musical peak - alot of the time so complex intimidating new listeners, Ege Bamyasi is a band flourishing as a self proclaimed "pulsing organism". This is Can's most influential album and and probably more accessible for new listeners, although most definitely not any better than Tago-it's certainly not any worse. This album is timeless and by far one of the best albums ever created, period.

Oh mah goodness! The grooves on this album are so tight, but they're not tight in that "bass player's right index finger and drummer's right foot do the same things all the time" kind of way. Things are far more interesting than that. Lyrics: crazy, sounds: crazy, grooves: crazy awesome. Also people who are somehow offended by Kanye's sample of "Sing Swan Song" need to get over it...like they were listening to Can in the seventies anyways.

This may be CAN's most fun album. It's my personal favorite. The very first second is a simultaneous squawk from the guitar, a crash from drums, and a smiling sigh from waaaay out there vocal stylist Damo Suzuki. "Pinch" proceeds to loosely veer through dangerous and unpredictable territory for nearly 10 minutes. "Sing Swan Song" is subdued and beautiful, perfectly transforming into the rhythm and quiet feel of the flowing of water that begins the track. It's also a great precursor to the more ambient explorations of their next album FUTURE DAYS. Like the next song, the lighter, airier "One More Night," it features a very exciting and creepily atmospheric keyboard sound.

"Vitamin C" is such a cool song. the mind-blowing rhythm machine Jaki Liebzeit steps up the intensity with a poly-rhythmic drum march and M. Karoli delivers a sinister descending jazz-guitar.

"You! You're losing! you're losing! you're losing! You're losing your VITAMIN C!"

"Vitamin C" dissolves into a computerized scramble which turns into the multifaceted "Soup" - actually it contains a good song or 2 in there before it goes off the map into some fascinating experimental territory a la the weirder moments on TAGO MAGO.

To my mind, "I'm So Green" is truly the epitome of COOL (unlike what some frankly misguided reviewer wrote somewhere around this forum). We get that great jazz guitar style again from Michael and an irresistibly catchy rhythm that breaks into an even catchier one to finish the song off - very smooth. And "Spoon" could be the coolest of all Can songs. It has a distinctive, trippy atmosphere, once again courtesy of those haunted keys.

This band was so creative and this album proves they were still riding the creative high they caught on their last album TAGO MAGO. I feel confident in saying this band's music will endure the test of time.

It's easy to see this as the more organic and aquatic-minded, somewhat less nervous sister record of Tago Mago. Along with that album, this one predicts everything from trip-hop to industrial to noise music to post-anything, and still comes out sounding more dangerous and essential than any of that. Throw your Lady Gaga albums in the garbage, buy this and change your life.

Over the course of their first three albums, Can gradually evolved from an aggressive, brittle rock sound to something more melodic, even soothing on their third official album Tago Mago. Even "Tago Mago", however, did not have the amazing beauty and melody that Can were to be so remarkable for. It was on "Ege Bamyasi" that Can really showed themselves to be one of the most unique and accomplished bands in the rock world, in the process clearly surpassing the achievements of underground pioneers like the Velvet Underground.

For the first time Can free themselves completely from tuneless jamming and make even the longer songs sound beautifully melodic through all the changes they undergo. This advance is clear from the first track "Pinch", whereby Karoli and Czukay especially show how they have developed their interplay so well in the opening lines and it continues all through an amazingly funky groove. Suzuki's vocals are more incomprehensible than Liz Fraser who has been compared with him for this. "Sing Swan Song" is softer and really beautiful like nothing else, and the watery sounds at the beginning anticipate Kate Bush by a decade. "One More Night" is even more cryptic - and more impressive: Suzuki's voice is even harder to hear but the metronomic drumming is a slow dance too precise for words. The atmospheric beauty, too, showed that "rock" music could create feelings nobody beforehand suspected it could.

"Vitamin C" is so urgent, even desperate, that though closer is sound to Can's previous albums than anything on the first side of "Ege Bamyasi" is beats them because it is so catchy and even inviting - a word one would rarely use of so experimental a band. "Soup", in contrast, is the only mis-step on "Ege Bamyasi" and falls at large into the trap of the more experimental parts of "Tago Mago" in lacking any sense of cohesion. However, the band returns to genuine form on "I'm So Green", which is as funky as Can ever got and the spontaneity of Damo Suzuki's lyrics is refreshing: when he sings the title you simply do not expect it, which is another rare feat Can seem to manage so often. Closer Spoon was actually a hit single in Germany owing to its use on the soundtrack of "Das Messer" ("The Knife"), and is just as catch as the other two short tracks on the second side. This does not detract from its merits or power, though.

All in all, "Ege Bamyasi" stands as a most impressive development that showed Can could move far beyond where their underground predecessors had gone. Emotional yet abstract, beautiful yet totally funky, it really should be heard.