Prior to 1990, Can were a band I'd only heard about, lumped in with the German bands all callously tossed under the "Krautrock" umbrella, so when they finally made their debut on CD, I made sure to give them a try. Ege Bamyasi was my first, and it was not quite what I was expecting -- very repetitive and groove-oriented, it seemed on the surface to be the antithesis of the complex meters and multi-part suites that were part and parcel of prog. However, it did sound pretty awesome, so I continued to buy up their back catalog as it became available, even if I never considered them as a particular favorite. Even Future Days, the subject of this gushing review, only received an occasional listen at the time.
It was a few years later that the details and the soul within this album hit me like a ton of bricks. That epiphany has stuck. If I had to name my favorite album of all time, this would probably be it.
These days, Can is an extremely hip band to name-drop. Their immeasurable influence on bands as diverse as Public Image Limited, Primal Scream, The Flaming Lips, and Radiohead (all extremely hip bands themselves) has put Can in an elite class of "influence" bands. And that is understandable. They were doing a sort of pre-trip-hop groove music all the way back in the early 70s, with studio sound quality that rivals that of their modern-day acolytes, despite having recorded most of it in their own studio on reel-to-reel tape with a minimum of overdubs. Still, Can can be an acquired taste for even the hippest of listeners. You can't blaze that many trails without leaving a bit of a mess in your wake, and Can could be difficult listening at times.
The key to their success (artistically anyway) was their tremendous skill at recording, engineering and editing the hundreds of hours of jams that were the band's daily work. Much of the credit for this goes to bassist Holger Czukay, a former student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who took the curating and editing process as seriously as the music itself. Keyboardist/noisemaker Irmin Schmidt was also a Stockhausen student and had similarly sophisticated strategies in mind when crafting his parts and deciding what worked and what didn't. His role was laying beds of weird textures and chords to buttress the rhythmic storm of the ensemble. Speaking of which...
No discussion of Can's incredible music is complete without heaps of praise laid on drummer Jaki Liebezeit who makes it all sound so easy. Indeed, you can listen to an entire album and realize you never stopped focusing on the drums (I do this with Led Zeppelin sometimes too). Guitarist Michael Karoli, much younger than the other guys in the band, was arguably the most conventional musician of the bunch, and helped ground their albums in a standard psych/rock language that improved its accessibility. That would still not be enough without the Czukay/Liebezeit groove machine sending your mind and body into a trance.
Each of the four tracks - one short one, two long ones, and one really long one - maintains the calm yet tense mood (upping the tension to a fever pitch at times, when needed) but approaches it from a different angle. Whether in a fun and playful hop ("Moonshake"), a foggy float through the clouds ("Future Days"), an exciting foot race through a dark forest ("Spray"), or all three at once ("Bel Air"), the focus and control of the band is felt throughout. Future Days is a remarkable achievement, which I highly recommend particularly to fans of adventurous modern indie rock. This was Radiohead's "Kid A's daddy", as one forum participant described it after I recommended Future Days to him.
Dan:
Years ago, Steve fed me a bunch of Can CDs, which I listened to dutifully but probably only played once or twice. I did not rip any of them into my digital collection. Within the past two years, however, I noticed that Future Days had been remastered and reissued as a Hi Rez download, so I asked Steve if he still had a copy I might revisit. Excitedly, he said Future Days was his all-time favorite album and brought me the CD and a new heavy vinyl pressing. The vinyl's sonics were especially impressive. We eventually "needle dropped" Side 2 of the vinyl into a lossless digital file which I combined with the rest of the Hi Rez tracks that I downloaded.
I'm glad I did so because I really like the whole album and agree with Steve's gushing assessment. Each time I play Future Days, I marvel at the discipline of the bass and drum lines, which never seem to relent. I'll also add mention of a key member of the band - vocalist Damo Suzuki, shown in the partial band photo with Holger Czukay. His vocals add a patina of mystery over the music on Future Days, whether he's chanting a lyric or just vocalizing wordlessly.
Lastly, I recalled the name Holger Czukay from his two duets with David Sylvian: Plight & Premonition (1988) and Flux + Mutability (1989). Czukay's penchant for ambient creations elevated those albums from the snooze of traditional ambient, and it's now obvious to me why Future Days has such distinctive rhythmic juice.
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