Can: Can Box

Despite the adulation and admiration from—and outright appropriation by—bands as disparate as The Talking Heads, Pet Shop Boys, The Fall, and Stereolab, Can has remained the quintessential cult act. In recent years, however, that cult has grown sizable enough to warrant a box set, and with that box set has come a bevy of new assessments of the band. Predictably, people had been placing Can on a pedestal for so song that a minor backlash has set in, with some critics deriding it as dated and/or overrated. On the surface, it's easy to decide that there's truth to the former—Can was of a time, and that time was the mind-expanding early '70s—but not the latter. Leading Germany's psychedelic Krautrock movement, Can was an organic counterpart to the intellectual man-machine of Kraftwerk: All groove, it was a chugging locomotive loaded with new ideas and an insatiable thirst for experimentation. Anchored by unflappable drummer Jaki Liebezeit, the remaining three members (aided at times by American vocalist Michael Mooney or Japanese singer Damo Suzuki) would often improvise around simple but undeniably funky vamps. Bassist Holger Czukay applied hand-editing techniques to the band's tapes, while keyboardist Irmin Schmidt explored the early possibilities of the synthesizer. Guitarist Michael Karoli filled in the gaps, while Mooney and later Suzuki both utilized a decidedly nontraditional approach to vocals. Yet, for all its worth, only a few consistent documents remain of the band's genius: Though Can would continue on well after its creativity began to run dry, its early works—Monster Movie, Tago Mago, and Ege Bamyasi—still hold up as blueprints for any number of avant-pop permutations. These are the records where a neophyte should begin: Can Box is mostly for the Can fan who has everything, and even then, it's hardly vital. It includes a relatively interesting, albeit awkwardly conceived, book of interviews and essays—presented simultaneously in German, French, and English—that should have been distilled to a traditional booklet. There's also a video (with a documentary and some rare performances) that complements the two discs of additional live material included herein. Frankly, a band of Can's stature deserves more than Can Box has to offer, and surely the set doesn't mark the end of its steady stream of reissues and rarities. Ultimately, bad fashions and haircuts aside, nothing about Can is dated: Just because the band was formed at the height of psychedelia doesn't mean it should forever be rooted there. Can's rhythms are as potent and unusual in today's world as they ever were.