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52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rock & Roll Goes To Neptune, 13 Jan 2003
This must be my sixth attempt to write a review of Tago Mago, Can's third album, which is far and away the most difficult album to write about that I have ever encountered. It's dense and confounding. It profoundly challenges the concept of music. It is the closest one can come to a sound recording of the mental processes of dementia. And it is utter, utter genius.
If Amazon would let me, I would give Tago Mago eleven stars. Never mind the fact that it's not the most accessible of Can's albums (that would be Soundtracks), or the most disciplined (see Ege Bamyasi.) I can't even say with conviction that it's their best work. But what I do know for certain is that Can's reputation for musical radicalism, avant-garde experiments, and free sound structure, is almost entirely based on Tago Mago, on which the German boys take rock music from its bases in Britain and America and launch it to Neptune.
Tago Mago is so daring, imaginative, and downright schizophrenic that it makes everything else that Can ever did seem tame and safe by comparison. It's often seen as a deliberate concept album about the path from sanity to absolute madness; I don't know how deliberate the concept was, but it certainly works. You can hear order and stability be dissected, exploded, and rebuilt completely.
The proceedings start off with "Paperhouse," a hypnotic song in a slow, bluesy groove that builds to a frenetic, almost desperate shout of sound, drums pounding with tremendous insistence, electronics offering bloopy bleeps here and there, and guitar and bass trying to maintain some sense of melody to keep the whole thing from deteriorating into mad chaos. After seven and a half minutes it dissolves into "Mushroom," a funky midtempo that is fairly consistent. It's mostly drums, with the other instruments accentuating the rhythm in patches, and Damo wailing his nonsense with what is, for him, a great deal of restraint. This is rhythmic minimalism in its most radical form, and it's counteracted by "Oh Yeah", another seven-and-a-half-minute epic that sounds this time like a 60s garage rock song gone completely haywire. The band return to the pounding drums and the insistent bass, moving at a running pace with stinging guitar riffs soloing all over the place, the keyboards moving from electronic ambience to white noise at the drop of a hat, and Damo talks without saying anything, often literally: he blabbers syllables that might be Japanese, might be made up on the spot. This is where things really start to teeter at the edge of comprehensibility.However, the real heart of Tago Mago is in the three long songs that make up sides two, three, and most of four on the original 2-record release. Side 2 is comprised of the 18 minute, 32 second "Halleluwah," a jam that is equal parts psychedelic jam, beat poetry, funk groove, and avant-garde jazz. As always, every piece of sound works together perfectly, this time with a ranting violin floating around in the mix. Damo raves, yells, wails and sputters as usual; occasional fragments of comprehensibility rise to the surface, but the dominating lyrical idea is, and I quote, "Ha-le-le-le-le-le-le-le-le-le-le-lu-WAH! Ha-le-le-le-le-le-le-lu-WAH!" And then there's "Aumgn." Hard to describe. Take, if you will, the most terrifying piece of music that you've ever heard. Then subtract any discernible patterns or rules. That's "Aumgn." It's silence with frequent interruption: strange atmospheric sounds, random drum licks, a creepy guitar motif, and muffled screamings while a guttural voice moans, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMGGGGGGGGGGNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN." It's the hardest piece of the album to digest, and the probably the key to the whole thing: everything that came before it is Tago Mago's rising action, and "Aumgn" the sound of all preconceived notions of music exploding, is the climax. That brings us to side 4: "Peking O" is the falling action, the moment wherein Can picks up the pieces of their dismantled music. It actually sounds as if they are sorting through aural debris, broken shards of sound and arrangements, and trying to identify and fit entirely disjointed bits of noise together. At one point Suzuki simply stops and screams a lightning-fast round of babble, which morphs into some kind of cosmic scat as the bass, drums, guitars, and weird noise start up in separate spheres and slowly coalesce back together into the rhythmic matrix that Can does so well. It's a perfect way to move to the final track, "Bring Me Coffee Or Tea," the resolution to the passage that Can (and we along with them) have taken. Back to melody, back to coherence in one of the most beautiful ballads that Can has ever done. The drums and bass pulse very gently together, with some light organ, tiny snatches of white noise, and delicate guitar layered along with it. The vocals are surprisingly mournful and expressive, and the whole package is simply gorgeous and actually approachable--by Can's standards anyway. The progression of ideas is breathtaking, and brilliant. What I have just described is an ambitious, complex work, more so than anything else that Can ever attempted. As such it is very likely their masterpiece, but at the same time can be a very awkward place to start. If you've never listened to Can, you will either be absolutely astounded by the accomplishment of Tago Mago, or absolutely repelled by the weirdness of it. I would therefore recommend it, but with major reservations: such things take some serious getting used to. But no matter where else you go with Can, there is no question that Tago Mago is the one place that you absolutely MUST come back to.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
1971's double-album masterpiece..., 1 Jun 2005
'Tago Mago' advanced on the climes established by 'Delay 1968','Monster Movie' & 'Soundtracks' and remains part of a trilogy of classics when Can were fronted by Damo Suzuki (the others being 'Ege Bamyasi' & 'Future Days'). It's an epic double-album that opens and closes on similar sounding tracks, between veering off into avant-garde directions which get stranger as the record progresses. 'Paperhouse' builds and builds from a funky-jazzy groove (that would become more apparent on 'Ege Bamyasi'), prior to shifting to the paranoid 'Mushroom', which would be covered by The Jesus & Mary Chain and sounds not unlike recent Primal Scream, where Damo hollers "I gotta keep my distance!" (or is it "I gotta keep my despair"? - it sounds like both...). 'Oh Yeah' builds on the strange-electronic-inflected grooves previously found on records by Can & precursors like The Beatles & The White Noise, again feeling like an odd groove with backwards-looped vocals that disorient (Can voyaging to inner space...). This peaks with the epic 'Halleluwah', which is thoroughly hypnotic, stretching a simple-groove over & over & predicting things like Happy Mondays ('Hallelujah') & The Stone Roses ('Fools Gold 9.53'). 'Aumgn' is more out there, a minimal electronic based piece that some find unlistenable- it sounds somewhere between Stockhausen and Japan's 'Ghosts' and would fit on a compilation between 'The Visitations' & 'Beachy Head.' Things get odder with 'Peking-O', which starts off with sinister ambient electronics, then a vocal "driving..." that reminds me of both Ian Curtis & Jim Morrison, before shifting into loops and babble that some may find hilarious. 'Peking-O' is total avant-meltdown that sounds like chaos - so it makes sense that things calm and seem to come back to circular norm with 'Bring Me Coffee or Tea.' 'Tago Mago' remains one of those difficult albums frequently considered a classic, alongside such joys as 'Trout Mask Replica', 'Electric Ladyland', 'Rock Bottom', 'Star Sailor' & 'Hex Enduction Hour.' This album and Can would also influence (or could be argued to influence)many acts afterwards - PIL, The Fall, Stereolab, Japan, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Julian Cope, Happy Mondays, Tortoise, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, The Stone Roses, Joy Division/New Order, David Bowie, Death in Vegas, Primal Scream, (late period) Talk Talk, Spacemen 3, Suicide, Laurie Anderson etc. 'Tago Mago' is a record that rewards, and sounds better in this version than the prior Spoon-release, and one I come back to - though 'Ege Bamyasi' is probably a better introduction to the unfamiliar...
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31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You know when you've been Tagoed, 28 April 2005
According to Julian Cope, "Every member of Can is a hero, a wizard and a truestar". According to The Rough Guide to Rock, "There is a significant lobby among fans and musicians that Can were the greatest band ever." With that sort of unrestrained praise to live up to, Can can't fail to disappoint. But for the most part, they don't.
Tago Mago - a double vinyl album in 1971 - certainly starts inauspiciously, with Damo Suzuki intoning ponderously over the plodding, clunky couple of verses that begin 'Paperhouse'. But Karoli's delicate guitar breaks suggest something better, and when the song veers off, the band soars into a wonderful dimension of lyrical guitar and insistent jazzy rhythm.
I'll leave the hollow industrial sound of 'Mushroom', with Suzuki's wordless shouting, to the cognoscenti; it does nothing for me. But 'Oh Yeah', with its reversed rhythms and vocal, is a shimmering masterpiece. Then 'Halleluhwah' ushers in 18 minutes of groove, underpinned by the wonderfully disciplined drumming of Jaki Liebezeit - for me the hero of this album, along with guitarist Michael Karoli.
A similarly mellifluous piece closes the album, but before that come 'Aumgn' and 'Peking-O', which are strange beasts indeed - more like the 'difficult' non-music favoured by 70s prog groups. To suggest, as one reviewer has, that this was totally unique and original, is not quite true. Gong and Hawkwind, in their dishevelled hippy ways, were fumbling in the same areas, and that violin sound can be heard on Mick Farren's Carnivorous Circus, but the philosophical discipline that carries 'Aumgn' through a whole side of vinyl is hugely impressive. The theme of primal superstition is superbly rounded off by a six-minute climax of rhythmic, trance-inducing drumming.
Frankly, I can do without many of Suzuki's contributions. He almost ruins 'Halleluhwah' when, half way through the track, he comes in with a loud 'OH!', as if someone has poked him in the ribs to remind him that, as vocalist, he had better contribute soon or he won't be getting paid. He then starts to recite the track listing of side one before mercifully subsiding into silence, leaving the listener to give thanks that most of his 'words' are indecipherable.
Although Schmidt and Czukay are the more famous members, and Suzuki even has a Fall song named after him, in terms of pure performance it is Karoli with his delicate guitar work and Liebezeit with his sophisticated yet simple rhythms who really carry Tago Mago.
The greatest band ever? I'm still not sure, but I've played this from beginning to end almost every day in the month since I bought it. It loses a star because I can't get my head around 'Mushroom', and because it sounds like Suzuki had got his head around one mushroom too many.
(Reviewer's 2009 update: this is actually one of the greatest albums ever recorded. I should have given it five stars because it's unreasonable to demand that something so original and groundbreaking should also be totally flawless)
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