FUTURE DAYS

CAN is one of my favorite bands and 'Future Days' is the album on which their experimental (krautrock) music is perhaps most accessible for the wider progressive public. On their earliest CAN would mix psychedelic/acid rock with psycho-beat, space rock, ethnical music and the avant-garde. Here the band would add an airy symphonic layer, yet without using much synths or keyboards. The band is drenched in a nice reverb or roomy sound that adds a spacey layer to this psycho-beat drenched album. The album's rhythms are highly hypnotic and the build-up of the compositions is very natural, yet hard to explain. By improvising and recording lots of music the band found new forms, combinations of sounds and transitions that make the music so original. Damo Suzuki's drugged out vocals fit perfectly on this record and his place in the mix is that of a fellow instrumentalist, there's no frontman here. Of all progressive rock masterpieces this one strikes particularly as a group effort of a band that could only have produced such an album by playing endlessly together. The timeless and hip song 'Moonshake' serves as a nice interlude between the spacey long pieces. If you'd buy only one krautrock album, I'd advise you to buy this one.