Ege Bamyası
by Can

From SquishypuffDave TOP 100 COMMENTER 11/15/2012 06:16 | #55055 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

Don't knock the canned stuff until you've tried it. This album is as tasty and nutritious as anything your momma cooked.

Paperhouse's hazy, washed out introduction to Tago Mago felt like softly slipping into a fever dream, slowly building to a plateu of fuzz guitar freakout, a fitting start to over 2 hours of material cut down and scraped together from sun-dried psychedelia and apocalyptic avant-garde experimentation. At the time, Ege Bamyasi wouldn't have sounded like anything but a natural progression to anyone who had heard Tago Mago, it's very distinctly Can. It has it's differences however, something which is apparent right from the opening moments of Pinch, which put the listener straight into the action. That dissonant note at the beginning and Damo Suzuki's muttered 'Ohh yeah' establish that you've caught them right in the middle of a jam session. There's no build up, no wait for them to lock into the groove, it's like you've walked into the venue to see Can on stage in full flow, playing off eachother masterfully. That sound is a guitar but it's not immediately apparent, Michael Karoli's constantly sustained feedback meanders between the lo-fi gurgles of pond-life during nighttime to the wails of birds and insects above. The keyboard and percussion cut in and out without warning, sometimes ambient and sometimes alien. Holger Czukay teases you with a bassline caught between a strictly percussive role and the all out jazz-funk of 'Halleluwah'. The duality is present in Suzuki's vocals too, there's no middle ground between mumbled and shouted on Pinch, this may be my favourite of his performances with the band.

The abrasiveness is restricted to the second half of "Soup", the beginning of which is signified with an explosion and proceeds to out-weird "Aumgm" and "Peking O". Elsewhere, Ege Bamyasi is arguably Can at their most accessible during the Damo Suzuki period, sandwiched between the noisy second half of Tago Mago and the ambient qualities of Future Days which had less room for vocals and more room for field recordings. Can stop short of the 4 minute mark on three occasions, each time sounding as close as they ever got to a conventional pop song (in fact Spoon was a hit in Germany). The music never comes across as a "watered down" version of previous material though, the flavour created by the bands interests and influences is just split into easily digestible chunks. Maybe i shouldn't use food metaphors on an album with such a strong food theme, hmm.

Impossible to understate the weight of this album and influence it had on so many currents of underground (and some above ground) music scenes to follow it. (Not to mention how this album and band upended and revolutionized my own appreciation of music 20-some years ago.)

Can at the height of its 1968-1974 glory combined Velvet Underground DIY with Miles Davis fusion, Stockhausen experimentation, James Brown soul and groove, some Faust-like recording studio-as-instrument techniques, plus more, then threw it all out to fly eyes-closed improvising via some collective unconsciousness driven workshop where individual members vanished into a hive-mind. Their records are truly avant-garde artefacts (masterpieces) we'll surely still be listening to and studying decades and perhaps centuries from now.

The "Soup"/"Vitamin C" medley is one of the most exciting and exhilarating musical experiences I can think of. And yeah "Spoon" is killer bad-ass. Not a wrong note on the record! ❤️ (Edited)

Wow, these guys sure stole a lot from Radiohead

CAN is one of the most extraordinary and inventive groups in Rock history. Their "Krautrock" releases a psychedelic energy with German sauce. On this album we find progressive songs rock, blues and a little funky. "Ege Bamyasi" is less dark than "Tago Mago" because of the funky drum game and the groovy bass. The strange solos of guitarist Michaël Karoli are exellent. To conclude, "Ege Bamyasi" is one of CAN's best album and a classic of Experimental Rock. I find it, nevertheless, a little less interesting than "Tago Mago", their masterpiece.

9/10

Best songs: "Vitamin C" (Edited)