Kraftwerk
Trans Europe Express

Far from being just a musical-choreographic game and instead representing a watershed in 1970s music, in 1975-1978 Kraftwerk produced three historic and rightly famous albums, emerging strongly from the magmatic group of German Kosmische Musik and rightfully occupying a place in Western music due to a precise aesthetic conception of music. It's with Autobahn (1974) that Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider have the enlightenment to discipline the krautrock experimentation of Kraftwerk I, Kraftwerk II, and Ralf & Florian within a noise and electronic research aimed at describing various areas of technology and modern living, starting with the automobile and continuing with the radio, the train, the robots, and later with the computer and even the bicycle, their great passion.

With Radio-Activity (1975), Kraftwerk crafted an eerie album, literally immersed in radio waves and interference, producing elegiac, slow songs with the characteristic obstinate bass and obviously electronic and metronomic percussion (I occasionally think that Stephen Morris's military and square drumming for Joy Division is directly inspired by their rhythms). Kraftwerk - this one of the novelties - play by subtracting rather than adding, pauses count as much as music, keyboards punctuate musical themes without frills or embellishments, without legatos, obviously the concept of "solo" does not exist because the didactic character of the tracks takes precedence, and the music remains at the service of the image. A new musical aesthetic, clearly supported by atypical but very valid songs beyond the instrumentation used.

A couple of years pass, and Kraftwerk, who by then had become a small cult and David Bowie's favorite band, storm into the charts with Trans Europe Express, aided by the eponymous track (actually a 13-minute suite in two parts) that celebrates and describes the relentless progress of a modern train across Europe, famous for the electronic voice and metallic rhythm which in the second part of the composition, programmatically titled Metal On Metal, unmistakably foreshadows industrial music and uses a familiar sound, emphasizing it, to narrate the aesthetics of progress, confessing a connection with Futurism that almost no one at the time wanted or was able to perceive. Autobahn and Radio-Activity, in fact, had described without overly detailing, limiting themselves to the sound of the car starting, horns, the sound variation of sinusoidal waves, and the imaginary crackle of radio waves; TEE, on the contrary, plays the train, it's as if it had been sampled, we are indeed in the carriage observing Europe flowing from Berlin to Paris up to the predictable, shrill final brake at the station.

The album actually opens with Europe Endless, a long, beautiful, and sunny pattern of keyboards (in this album sequencers dominate) that describes what it promises, without ever forcing the rhythm and instead accustoming the listener to the aesthetics and philosophy of the journey, which is as valuable as and can be more valuable than the destination to be reached. The theatrical Hall Of Mirrors projects identity issues onto the spectral and suspended stage of electronic bass and a thousand and one mirrors, both real and existential, made more accessible in the subsequent Showroom Dummies ("mannequins"), which foreshadows the modern pop of 1978's Man Machine (The Robots, The Model), when the full identification of man and machine will be achieved. The suite of the trans-European train obviously leaves a very metallic impression; in the second part, it seems that hammers "play" the rails, and it's impossible not to think of Einsturzende Neubauten, this is where their revolution of mallets and pneumatic hammers begins. To temper the triumphant mechanical nature of this track follows the dreamy Franz Schubert, an elegy in a major key with a obviously classical tone, not common for Kraftwerk of the period and still built on a delicate synthesizer pattern created with the sequencer, which incorporates the final vocoder of Endless Endless, an echo effect finale for a beautiful and justly famous album.

The punk movement will leave Kraftwerk alone - they were more inhuman than them - and all music of the Eighties derived from new wave, not only industrial but also synth-pop, will demonstrate having taken good note of each of their tracks, while from the nineties onwards, the sampling of their metallic sounds and even tribute albums will multiply. Less compromised with pop than the subsequent Man Machine (still beautiful, because they invented electronic pop) and less eerie than the previous one, Trans Europe Express remains the album to be prioritized to get to know this unique and fascinating band, which had the merit of imposing a musical and cultural aesthetic through its albums.