The best Can album, according to Weyes Blood: “What rock and roll should be”
Weyes Blood has built her entire foundation on bringing the best experimental music of the past into the modern age. Although plenty of contemporary tunes are sprinkled throughout her discography, just as many seem to have been ripped out of the glory days of 1970s singer-songwriters, almost as if Karen Carpenter had been resurrected decades after the fact. Natalie Mering never forgot her weird edge, though, and she thought that Can opened her eyes to what music could sound like.
As the Woodstock generation was slowly ramping up in 1969, Can was a completely different animal on their debut Monster Movie. While it’s easy to call them progressive due to their style of music, they were less interested in rock altogether and more concerned with making some of the most interesting styles of music that they could.
Whereas most people would just flock to the next fantastic record from James Taylor, this is the equivalent of throwing different ethereal sounds out into the world and just seeing what happens. There are definitely callbacks to the psychedelic sounds of the time, but there are just as many moments in the epic ‘Yoo Do Right’ that feel like they’re lifted from a jam taking place on the opposite side of the galaxy.
In fact, there’s a good chance that the rest of the world needed a little bit of time to catch up to Can. When looking at what David Bowie and Kraftwerk would be doing years later, this laid the groundwork for genres like krautrock in terms of the wild approaches everyone brought to their respective instruments.
Since the modern age is full of artists trying to make the most of everything under the sun, Mering said this kind of move was wildly fascinating, telling TIDAL, “It’s kind of an unpopular Can record, which is funny because I actually loved Monster Movie the best. That was my first exposure to Kraut [rock] and kind of like jamming and bitten lyrics. It was my first exposure to the underbelly of what rock & roll is or should sound like.”
There are even a few moments on some of Mering’s latest records that have a little piece of Can baked into their DNA. Whereas Titanic Rising felt like one of the most beautiful baroque pop records ever made, that adventurous desire to push outside of the usual singer-songwriter tropes is something that Can was all about.
It’s not like Mering is a lone wolf spreading the gospel of Can. Considering how psychedelic a lot of their music sounded back in the day, it’s easy to see the krautrock veterans’ influence pop up in everyone from Radiohead’s spacey sounds on Kid A to the neo-psychedelic music that came in with the emergence of people like Animal Collective and Tame Impala.
A lot of people have tried to find their muse by going back to progressive giants like King Crimson but Can wasn’t looking to make complex scale exercises. This was progressive in the sense of testing what rock could do, and the next few decades ended up taking more than its fair share of lessons from them.
