Track Listing

1. Deadlock
2. Tango Whiskyman
3. Deadlock
4. Don't Turn The Light On Leave Me Alone
5. Soul Desert
6. Mother Sky
7. She Brings The Rain

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19554 in Music
• Released on: 2007-10-22
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

CD Description
As Can rose to prominence in the '70s in Germany, keyboardist and co-founder Irmin Schmidt sought film-related projectsfor the band. SOUNDTRACKS collects exclusive material culled from Can's cinematic contributions. The album features vocals from both original vocalist Malcolm Mooney and from his mid-period replacement, Kenji "Damo" Suzuki, making it unique in Can's discography. And, with such crowd-pleasers as "She Brings the Rain" and the titanic "Mother Sky," SOUNDTRACKSremains another testament to Can's genius. Suzuki's moaning, half-mad vocals and a slow-motion arc of Michael Karoli's splendidly psychedelic guitar work dominate "Deadlock." Suzuki croons through one of Can's most luscious melodies on "Tango Whiskeyman," another glistening Karoli workout that alsoshowcases the matchless rhythmic duo of Holger Czukay (bass) and Jaki Liebezeit (drums). Mooney delivers a memorable mood swing with the gut-wrenching funk of "Soul Desert" and "She Brings the Rain," a coffeehouse-quiet charmer. But it is "Mother Sky," the incomparable, 14:30 acid rock colossus with the swaying, trance-inducing Suzuki mumble, Karoli fireworks, seething Schmidt psychedelics, and brain-bending Czukay/Liebezeit groove, that is SOUNTRACKS' towering achievement.

Customer Reviews

a mixed but mostly excellent bag, superbly remastered
This album, featuring Can's contributions to five separate film soundtracks, was recorded in late 1969 (the two tracks featuring original Can vocalist Malcolm Mooney) and late Spring/Summer 1970 (the remainder featuring his replacement, Damo Suzuki). But in the circumstances, it hangs together quite well as an album, having all been recorded in the same place on the same equipment.

The opening three tracks from the film Deadlock include vocal and instrumental versions of a tune that, unlike everything else here, is an obvious film theme, though with Michael Karoli's exquisitely distorted guitar to the fore, along with a quite accessible song, Tango Whiskyman, which is good but not their greatest. The excellent Don't Turn The Light On, Leave Me Alone is the first Can song to feature the four descending semitones that they returned to on many occasions throughout their career, both live and in the studio, and features some superb latin-inflected drumming from Jaki Liebezeit. Soul Desert is a terrifyingly bleak, minimalist howl of anguish from Mooney and clearly foretells the breakdown that led to him leaving Can and returning to the USA a few weeks later.

The 14 minute Mother Sky is the first really great track Can recorded with Damo Suzuki and combines full on guitar rock (one of Michael Karoli's finest performances) with their hypnotic rhythmic pulse to brilliant effect. The track has been edited from a clearly much longer recording and the seamless, if obvious, edits add structure and changes of mood to a track that motors on at the same tempo for its entire length. On top of this, they've added some highly effective drum overdubs, dropping "bombs" into one of the most hypnotic sections. The whole track, musically brilliant as it is, is also a tour de force of recording and editing - all done with a couple of 2-track machines, an editing block and a razorblade by bassist Holger Czukay.
Finally, and perhaps most atypically, we return to (a much happier) Malcolm Mooney for the lovely She Brings The Rain, a cute sixties pop song with a slightly jazzy feel, no drums and quite psychedelic lyric. One could almost imagine The Lovin' Spoonful recording it; it's one of very, very few Can recordings that look back musically in any obvious way, though none the worse for that.

This album isn't the pinnacle of Can's career by any means, but it does contain one of their greatest tracks in the awesome Mother Sky and the rest of it varies from good to excellent. It's probably a good place to start for the uninitiated, being far more accessible, for instance, than their next album, the astounding but at times extremely weird Tago Mago.

For any Can fans who already have the earlier CD issue of this album, I'd say get rid of it and buy this - the remaster is fabulous, revealing some amazing sub-bass booms in Mother Sky, greatly improving the timbre of the guitar on Deadlock and generally being far brighter, punchier and more detailed than the earlier edition.

One "Monster" track makes it all worthwhile.
Soundtracks might be put down as just for Can completists if it were not for track 6 "Mother Sky", all 14min and 30sec of it. Some of the late Michael Karolis' finest playing is to heard on this one track together with some inspired percussion and a typical Damo Suzuki breathy-dream vocal. Priceless stuff with a killer groove. I can't believe this was recorded just for a movie!
And the rest?
2 tracks from the Deadlock movie - not typical Can and you probably have to see the movie ( If any one has?!)
Tango Whiskyman and Don't turn the light on are more typical Damo period Can - Ok, but not outstanding by their standards.
1st Can vocalist Malcom Mooney gives it some on Soul Desert. If Monster Movie was your favourite Can album then you'll want to hear this too. Finally, there is She Brings the Rain. Mr Mooney again on what might be an average walking blues song but with Holger Czukay painfully attempting to play a structured and very rigid bassline it couldn't be average if it tried - and there's some very pretty/normal guitar from Herr Karoli too. I honestly can't tell if the fiddle/viola on this is Michael again or Irmin Shmidt distorting the hell out of his Farfisa organ!
Never mind - play Mother Sky again.

It's All About 'Mother Sky'
Can’s claim to immortality rests largely on the hat-trick of stunning albums they released between 1971 and 1973 – Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days – but there are other good things to be found in their back catalogue if one takes the time to look. Their debut album, Monster Movie, was released in 1969 and featured their original American vocalist, Malcolm Mooney. It has moments of genius – not least the barmy rereading of ‘Mary, Mary So Contrary’ – but its brilliance is patchy in comparison to the creative peak they hit in the early ’70s.

To be fair, much the same can be said of Soundtracks, the album created after Monster Movie, and consisting of tracks composed for various (largely forgotten) films which only keyboardist Irmin Schmidt had seen at the time (the modus operandi was that he gave the other band members roughly drawn storyboards of the films, and then left it to their compositional and improvisatory skills). This somewhat hare-brained approach to musical creativity is typical of much Krautrock, and the upshot is obviously that all the musical ideas are filtered through Schmidt’s impression of the films. This, the fact that soundtrack albums are often disjointed affairs anyway, and the fact that the album was made during the period where Mooney left the band and Damo Suzuki joined, all make Soundtracks something of a mish-mash.

The core of this album lies in just two songs: ‘“Don’t turn the Light on,” leave me alone’ and ‘Mother Sky’. Mooney’s last two contributions to Can – ‘Soul Desert’ and ‘She Brings The Rain’ – are both pretty decent numbers, mining the same vein as Monster Movie’s ‘Yoo Doo Right’ and drawing on Can’s jazz background respectively, but they lack the magic that the group really found with Suzuki. This is exemplified in the relatively understated ‘“Don’t turn the Light on…”’, where Suzuki’s soon-to-be-familiar mangled syntax and cryptic lyrics combine to add a further air of mystery to Can’s already enigmatic music. The track seems to throb with suspense, riding on Holgar Czukay’s darkly expressive bass line, without ever exploding in the way it seems to be threatening to. As an example of sustained tension, it’s hard to top, and it also underlines the difference between Can with Damo Suzuki, and Can without: the music the band created with him onboard has a distinctive, tough, elasticity; something that was far less obvious in their work with Mooney.

The album’s centrepiece, of course, is the much lauded ‘Mother Sky’. For once, the praise is justified, and here there’s certainly no sustained tension, this is a full-blown post-psychedelic freak out. The song just erupts into life and doesn’t let up for the entirety of its near fifteen minute duration. Although the song operates in a recognisably Can-like way – i.e. it locks into a groove and maintains it throughout – it seems to be even more unrestrained than Can’s other, similar, work. The guitars here seem more strident, the rhythms even more frantic, giving the song greater ferocity than even this mighty band usually managed. The playing is typically excellent, but the shrieking guitar, pummelling rhythm and frenetic pace make this song a very different beast to the laid back, slowly unfurling funkiness of ‘Halleluhwah’. Obviously, the track’s sheer length, and its mildly unhinged feel – again aided by Suzuki’s lyrics and vocals – make it a direct predecessor of the likes of ‘Pinch’, ‘Halleluhwah’ and ‘Paperhouse’, but it seems less obviously forward-looking than much of the work from their early ‘70s heyday, instead echoing the likes of Iron Butterfly or late ‘60s Pink Floyd at times, albeit given a very Can makeover. To this day, the band’s typically focused performance still makes the music utterly compelling in a way that the likes of Pink Floyd’s never was. Much of Can’s genius lays in their playing, and the sheer attack here is what drives the music along, largely diverting the attention away from these influences. If that sounds like a quibble, it really isn’t, because although this track might seem a little less visionary than the music that would follow on Tago Mago, it clearly signposts where the band were heading once Suzuki joined, and because it’s performed by a band as unconventional as Can it seems fresher and much less clichéd than a lot of other music of the time.

Great as ‘Mother Sky’ and ‘“Don’t turn the Light on…”’ undoubtedly are, the album’s real weakness is that it is a collection of disparate songs and ideas, rather than a unified whole created organically in the way that the best Can albums were – for instance, ‘Aumgm’ or ‘Peking O’ from Tago Mago might not make for easy listening, but they feel as though they need to be there; this album would lose little if the likes of ‘Tango Whiskyman’ or ‘Deadlock’ were excised. As a result, it gives the impression of being a stopgap – which is essentially what it was – rather than a ‘proper’ album. Of course, listening to Can marking time is far more interesting than listening to most bands striving for perfection, but as a whole album it’s hard to describe this as essential listening. It’s not the best place to start discovering Can and will largely – and probably rightly – be bought by people simply for the two best tracks here, and fortunately for those buyers ‘Mother Sky’ alone is worth the price of admission.