Electric Cafe

When Kraftwerk's "Electric Cafe" was first released in late 1986, I immediately picked it up on cassette. Back in 1986, I considered it a disappointment compared to their earlier work. It wasn't until 1999, when I picked up the CD to replace my old cassette that I rediscovered "Electric Cafe" in a completely different way. "Electric Cafe" isn't Kraftwerk's best album but it certainly is a crowning achievement. There is more emphasis on rhythm and beat than on any previous Kraftwerk album. Also, the use of sampled repeated phrases (ie: "Boing Boom Tschak") is now commonplace in today's dance music. There also is a slight minimalist approach to this music. Kraftwerk stripped their sound to its bare essentials here keeping the music simple and slightly more repetitive than on previous efforts. There was even one bonafide hit on "Electric Cafe". "The Telephone Call" was in frequent rotation on many dance music stations at the time. The track also is unique because neither Ralf Hutter nor Florian Schneider sing lead vocals on this song. For the first and last time, percussionist Karl Bartos sings a lead vocal.
Although it is slightly underrated and there are better Kraftwerk albums available, "Electric Cafe" has aged gracefully over the years. Many of the sounds that Kraftwerk introduced here have now caught on with a younger generation of electronic musicians. This album was somewhat of a blueprint for what was yet to come with this genre of music. My thoughts on this album are different now than they were in 1986. This album becomes more enjoyable each time I listen to it. It can really grow on you and get you hooked. While it isn't a classic, "Electric Cafe" is a worthy investment. Check it out.

Okay, where do I start? "Electric Cafe" is a masterpiece. Their best album. Not only does it possess the streamlined economy of sound prevalent in other Kraftwerk albums, it combines that with real, cutting wit. I mean, how funny is "Boing boom tschak"? It's not supposed to be taken completely seriously! The rhythms have been honed and layered with precision and calculation. The album is very calculated. Everything is perfect. Everything is there for a reason, and the music woulnd't work without it. For example, the echo stopping the third time the voice says "boing boom tschak" at the very start. If the echo was there as with the first two times, the feel of the music would be very different. One must also point out the variety of sounds on this album is far greater than on any other Kraftwerk album (except "The Mix"). They really used the synths, samplers, vocoders and Robovox (their own synthetic voice generator) to maximum advantage. There are analogue "bleeps" here galore - bent, twisted and coloured with digital processors (every sound is meticulously detailed if you listen closely enough). There are synthetic strings, there are umpteen different snare, bass drum and cymbal emulations. Synthesised guitars. A plethora of new synthetic sounds, more extravagantly detailed than ever before by Kraftwerk and than any songs I have heard coming out these days. Loads of synthetic voices, some blatantly robotic and some very human sounding - "Speak&Spell" could have made a cameo, though! As for the ludicrous insults the title track has suffered in others' reviews, here are some of its lyrics: "aesthetic form, political art, dietary cuisine, in the atomic age". Raising concepts, raising issues, simply and with ambivalence! That's what art should do, and here are Messrs Hutter and Schneider isolating aspects of our modern "atomic age" for the listener to contemplate and evaluate for him or herself. The song is a work of art. The album as a whole lacks thematic omnipotence in that it concentrates rather more on the lonely, depersonalised side of modern living. It's a very social album - tracks like "Sex Object" and "The Telephone Call". I think it could have done with one or two more tracks, about other sides of modern life - office atmosphere, consumer fashions, television soaps, and so on, but I suppose that was all dealt with in the previous "Computer World" album. All in all, "Electric Cafe" is Kraftwerk coming down to the ground level. Technology is sex. Machines are sex. The so-called cold and sterile computer screen can be as "warm" as any human face. You just have to want it. In the end, language doesn't matter, because sound, rhythm and colour communicate so much more. "Boing boom tschak" indeed, because verbal language is dead. Technology could bring about our demise (ie "Terminator" territory) or it could seriously advance humanity onto a new stage, or both. Of course, anything is possible. "Electric Cafe" points to a new era of art.

It usually isn't a good sign when a band tosses a project away and detours into releasing an album.

In the case of Kraftwerk, the bulk of the Techno pop project was nixed after several years of work - though it produced a great video for the original version of Tour de France - for the dance club mix-tape, Electric Cafe.

The album was released five years after the classic Computer World & Kraftwerk's revolution within the studio that made electronics an industry standard.

I split the music into two segments, with the strongest by far Boing Boom Tschak, Techno Pop and Musique Non Stop. Though the final three cuts are interesting - The Telephone Call, Sex Object and Electric Cafe - they show a little strain in the band's cutting-edge creativity.

When released, the album was met with mostly critical reviews from fans and reviewers. But the sound surprisingly holds up well and, though not as adventurous as Computer World, it shows Kraftwerk pulsating to the rhythms of the dance floor they created years before.