#498 Guru Guru - Guru Guru

1973'd!

Just when I thought I'd heard all the Krautrock* heavy hitters out there I find another one. This actually has a whole lot less in common with mainstays like Neu, Can and Kraftwerk than they have with eachother, steeped much more deeply in good old rock and roll heat than in minimalistic iciness. Heck, there's nary a real motorik* to be found. Plus, everything here is English and wonderfully weird. Makes me wonder what all those Hütters and Suzukis have been saying all these years.

This is a profoundly difficult album to summarize: it's all over the map, and recklessly adventurous, but in ways that aren't immediately obvious. On the surface, these are a bunch of pretty rollicking, complex jams with clean, assertive melodic lines running through them, with veins of surf, doo wop, and blues, but the songs never settle, using these jumping off points as portals to places wholly strange.

Take Medley, A, B, C, D, which is all but a trip through all of rock and roll, starting off with a White Stripes-worthy riff, trundling into a well-worn shuffly chord progression, progressing into Grateful pluckerey, and then mutating into honest to god doo wop, with actual hand claps, and onward and onward, all the while being too weird, too bent, to fuzzy, to knowing to quite settle into anything you can get your head around.

Across the album there are offkilter rhythms, loping bass, jagged pre-post-punk guitars, and uncanny production, all jammed into strange structures bent out of shape by Guru Guru's will. Der Elektrolurch is the highlight, combining arty and catchy in ways that feel profoundly ahead of 1973 as a time. 12 minute closer The Story of Life is similarly amazing, evoking the artiest moments of bands like Radiohead, Talk Talk, and The Smashing Pumpkins (Window Payne), to say nothing of countless post-rock bands.

The reference-points that I so blindly praised, do, at times, I'll confess, wear a bit thin, but it is clearly an album made by some really goddamn smart, talented musicians, at least as interested in entertaining you as showing off, and that goes at least as far as the low end of 4.5/5

You might like this if: you have a little patience for some droney, experimental guitar music, but don't want something that is completely unlistenable in the name of artiness. This has hooks and interest to spare, and will take good care of you for its 42 minutes.

* do a shot