Can: Ege Bamyasi

Can: Ege Bamyasi

1972

United Artists Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Pinch  2. Sing Swan Song  3. One More Night  4. Vitamin C  5. Soup  6. I'm So Green  7. Spoon


This is my personal favorite Can album...It kind of feels like the fog has lifted from their sound, but it doesn't make them any less weird or unique...

 Kind of like the swamp monster that spends the movie shrouded in mist, but when you finally see him in the broad daylight he somehow seems even more bizarre...

 That's kind of what this feels like...A lot of the noise and marathon song-lengths are gone...Instead this is relatively tight and very very funky...

First off this has a couple of the band's best songs... Most notably  "Vitamin C"...This is the track that first got me into Can in the first place, and whenever anyone wants to know what Can is all about, this is what I show them...It has the coolest, funkiest drum beat ever set to tape...I'm not kidding you...Yea, yea, yea...I heard Kanye West sample the woozy (and also awesome)  "Sing Swan Song" on that "Hot and Drunk Girls" song or whatever...

But man, why didn't he use "Vitamin C"?  It's so much catchier...Damo Suzuki's vocals on this are also great...He starts out sounding like a mischievous sprite until he suddenly shouts, "Hey you! You're losing your vitamin C!" Seriously up there as one of my all-time favorite songs...



The other highlight is "Spoon," which was used as the theme song to some German television show called "Das Messer"...

I have zero idea what "Das Messer" is, but I can say without any hesitation it has probably the coolest theme song in history...

(Except for maybe Sanford & Son...)

The song has this air of mystery about it...A drum machine ticks off time as Damo whispers something about a spoon in the afternoon...The fact that these guys were doing the whole fake-drum/real-drum hybrid back in 1972 (about a full decade before drum machines became commonplace) says a lot about how ahead of the curve they were...

"Soup" is this album's big epic...This song features one of Damo's most memorable freakouts...He babbles, shouts incoherently (and commandingly) and  rolls a bunch of R's...It also has a keyboard or something that sounds exactly like Chewbacca...

If you're looking to get into the Damo Suzuki era, this is probably the best place to start...Save "Tago Mago" for your second purchase..."Ege Bamyasi" is sometimes less stunning, but it's a lot more manageable...There's a good dead 30 minutes smack-dab in the middle of "Tago Mago" but this is pretty trim...Honestly, the hardest song to make it through is the first one...After that you're all golden...

So let's check out "Vitamin C" by Can...