Can
Delay 1968

The Can of the Iron Age, fourteen years later.

The story of Can is now well known: albums like "Tago Mago", "Ege Bamyasi" or "Future Days" are now familiar not only to genre enthusiasts, but have entered the upper echelons of rock, being masterpieces sui generis. Those were the most successful Can, the ones from the '70s onwards, from Damo Suzuki, just to be clear, where each member had honed their technique, becoming a real rock supergroup, perhaps the best in Germany at that time, alongside Faust.

But Can have much deeper, and above all, dirtier origins.

Indeed, before Malcom Mooney (the group’s first voice) went mad and gave way to Damo, the sane one (?), Can recorded two albums: the fantastic "Monster Movie" and the imaginative "Soundtracks." And then there's this "Delay 1968". A collection of the group's first recorded tracks, released posthumously (1982) and for years mistreated and only considered a collection of Can-not-yet-Can tracks, unjustly so because this album is incredibly raw and dirty, with a genuineness and madness worthy of the best Velvet Underground (their major source of inspiration), Zappa, or Beefheart.
This album is even rawer and more animalistic than "Monster Movie." If I had to give it a flaw, well, it would be its duration, which is only 36 minutes. But as we well know, albums are not judged by their length, but by their quality and innovation: and so this album is really much more than it seems or than you've been told.

Because Malcom Mooney is an excellent voice, as crazy as Damo's, unstable as if he were standing on high-voltage cables, allowing himself improbable highs only to return to seriousness. And Liebezeit, Karoli, Czukay, and Schmidt accompany him, in his voluntary mental wandering every time, with a technique that may be inferior to that of the Can of the golden age, but with an effect of black rock, very grunge, pre-punk, children of the best hard school of Detroit, and at the same time fathers.
What happens between the grooves of this object is pure madness applied to the filthiest rock that existed until then.

It goes from trips not recommended for claustrophobic people in "Butterfly" and "19th Century Man" where rhythm changes contrast with Mooney's monotonous voice of eternal suffering, all accompanied by Karoli's magnificent and aggressive riffs, as he will rarely do later, to "Pnoom", very brief interlude of crazy trumpets that links the two aforementioned tracks with the glue of madness. In "Thief," Mooney launches himself solitary alongside Karoli's anguished guitar into an existential void that strikes the listener in its five minutes. The sonic coherence is confirmed by the penultimate "Uphill," which seems like a reprise of the opening track, but more animated and funk. It closes with a magnificent "Little Star Of Bethlehem," perhaps the best-crafted and successful track of the whole album, where you remain stunned listening to how beautifully the sung lyrics and the gradually growing instruments fit together, but never truly explode. The one who will really explode will be the eternal outcast Malcom, who will be forced to leave the group and perhaps take with him that impulsiveness that the band will gradually miss, until they reach well-studied and complex works, but not inferior for this reason, like "Future Days."

The advice is to get this initial triplet, just as essential as the later one (mentioned at the beginning). But don't be tempted to compare them, you would gain little or nothing good from it. They were two different "eras," even if in very close periods, with different musical ideas and different line-ups. So just limit yourself, so to speak, to enjoying this "Delay" and going crazy with Malcom, while he screams dying butterfly, began to fly.