Customer Reviews

Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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There are not many Krautrock books out there. All of them seem to be OOP. There is "The Crack In The Cosmic Egg", a very good and informative guide. "Cosmic Dreams At Play" very similar in format to "The Crack In The Cosmic Egg", but I think less informative and with opinions at times more subjective. Than there is "Cosmic Price Guide", basically a guide to rare krautrock records and prices. Finally the most famous of them all, at times inaccurate and subjective "Krautrocksampler" that I don't really find all that interesting.

This one is a different from all of the above because it contains some historical info, great photos and pictures, but most importantly great articles by different writers. Essays about bands are very well written and go way beyond simple, sweet and short overviews.

If you are looking for purely informative comprehensive guide about all things krautrock related (band info, albums, record labels etc.) don't get this book, get "The Crack In The Cosmic Egg" or maybe "Cosmic Dreams At Play". But of you like krautrock or are curious what this kraut stuff is all about get this one.

This is a great buy. The price makes it extremely worth getting, let alone all the interesting stories and great pictures. There is nothing really new offered here, BUT with Julian Cope's book on Krautrock being SO expensive now...this is a worthy alternative.

I would suggest this to anyone wanting to read something while listening to their vintage vinyl, or newbies wanting to learn what Krautrock was all about. I've listened to kraut for several years now, and even found new albums listed in here that I hadn't heard of before.

really great book!

A beautiful book to be sure but unfortunately almost completely devoid of new content. There are virtually no interviews, no new real scholarship and no discographies. It contains EXCELLENT photos and some really stellar rare ones from personal archives. However the text itself is dull and uninspired. Freely tossing around cheap descriptions of the music such as "mindbending" and "colourful" takes up the bulk of the text and a close read reveals no more than a handful of stories and facts beyond the normal fare for a lengthy MOJO magazine article. Every so often one is tortured by essays about bands by people from other bands many of which have nothing to do what-so-ever with the style at hand. These descend into journalistic attempts at describing the music colorfully rather than how, why and where it was made. Reading a play by play of the track 'Krautrock' by Faust was about as entertaining as watching paint dry. A disapointment after such wonderful treatments Black Dog Publishing has given Throbbing Gristle, Tarkovsky and Kenneth Anger.

To be fair this is a great coffee table book but on the informative scale rates lower than the most average album from 1970's Germany. Buy this if you want to look at big, nicely laid out pictures of synths (cluster's live rig being a highlight) and longhairs. Don't buy this if you want to really get into the nuts and bolts of this creative time in rock music. If you really want to learn about Krautrock check out the book that this was obviously sourced almost entirely from: Eurock: European Rock & the Second Culture by Archie Patterson

this is a terrific overview of the krautrock scene of the 70s -- after a brief overall intro, it spends most of its real estate on band-by-band overviews, with plenty of pictures, and finally label and producer overviews. i loved everything about it -- the multitude of perspectives by various critics, some quite unexpected (who would've thought that Stephen Thrower of Coil is a La Dusseldorf fan?!) influential but underground prime movers, like Conrad Schnitzler -- one of my personal heroes -- are not neglected; Schnitzler gets several pages. i love how the aesthetics of the book follow 70's conventions as well (take a look at the cover). some of the perspectives are a bit severe (e.g., the dismissal of TaDream's albums beginning with their Virgin phase), but it's always fun to read provocative opinions. so, not a book for deep experts who are looking to advance their knowledge of the scene with tons of new interviews or data on band output (the latter being obsolete anyway with the availability of web sites like Discogs), but a book for people who love this fascinating scene (as i do) and don't mind another addition to the thin bibliography of books on this unjustly neglected era. top marks.

My reaction to this book? To listen to all the albums not deemed worthy of note: such as Tangerine Dream after they started using sequencers; or actual rock bands, such as Jane and Scorpions; or the more commercial recordings of Amon Düül II; or, a band not even mentioned, Lucifer's Friend. My experience of German music from the early 1970s bears little resemblance to the music described in this book. The fact that I missed a lot of interesting music because of the limitation of what was available in northern Minnesota at the time and the fact that I couldn't afford new records (maybe the people who got rid of their mainstream German albums hung onto the more prestigious recordings) lent this book appeal. Most of the German bands I'd heard, even those not actually German such as Nektar, had a very different sound to them than American and British bands of the era (my taste was for British music, prog and metal and even glam, over American). Partly, it was because Germany was behind the times, with psychedelia lingering and a minimum of overdubbing and other forms of technical polish being the norm. More interestingly, these bands seemed to have retained or reacquired a European ęsthetic rather than trying to imitate the blues and soul.

So, yes, I wanted to learn more and hear more.

Unfortunately most of the contributors to the book are connoisseurs rather than music lovers, more interested in maintaining their Krautrock credibility than informing us as to the complexity and richness of German music at that time. I expect critics and fans to have strong opinions, to vehemently state that record A is vastly superior to record B, in fact to state that record B is such garbage that its effect on me will be worse than kryptonite on Superman, but I still want to hear about record B. I have no patience for writers who can't overcome their insecurities enough to pass on information that weakens and taints their position of superiority just by admitting that they possess such knowledge. I want to taste it all and make up my own mind, even risking a display of crassness and vulgarity.

The gems within this book: Michel Faber's introductory essay, Im Glück, discussing why Germans don't listen to Krautrock, and an exit article from Actuel No. 27, January 1973 by Jean-Pierre Lantin, At Last: German Rock Has Arrived. Many of the articles about specific bands are interesting and informative--don't get me wrong, not all of the contributors are worthless pustules.

The one truly pathetic article was on Tangerine Dream. Even though they've been around for close to 45 years, they only did four albums worth discussing, the fourth already being a disappointment, and everything else is nothing but betrayal of Krautrock purity. I think a lot of people would like to read more about the later developments of Tangerine Dream, to say nothing of the fact that most fans consider the next phase of their recordings, the early albums on Virgin (Phaedra, Rubicon, et al.) to be the band's best work. It's not quite like saying Barry Manilow had that one good record, but Tangerine Dream is so often reviled by Krautrock aficionados that to even like their first few recordings is to put one's self in a very distasteful place, you may as well be singing along with Barry as to admit liking post-sequencer T. Dream.

I would agree that the individuals and bands covered in this book are among the most interesting and exciting at that time, in Germany or anywhere else. I also have to stress that their was a lot of mainstream music in Germany that was still more interesting and exciting than many of their British and American contemporaries. To quote Michel Faber's essay, "To my ears, even a run-of-the-mill German album from the 1970's has more charm than a run-of-the-mill British or American one. 1970s Germany was special."

I was hoping this release would shed/add new light to the history of Krautrock. Sorry, I was disappointed. Very little new is provided in words or pictures/photos. The small size Krautrocksampler is a David compared to this current Goliath. This work is just a supplement to the genre, not a trailblazer!