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Album Review
by SaschaS
5-8-2003
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| Kraftwerk: ahead of also-ran pack, just |
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Kraftwerk: 'Tour de France Soundtracks'
(EMI)
Kraftwerk – the cyber-quartet’s (t)races
Kraftwerk, a name as huge, legendary, enigmatic and revered as the Monolith from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. But, release-wise it was as silent as the movies from the cinematic infancy. ‘Sunset Boulevard’: signs of stagnation and putrefaction – and we’ve been KrautRock fans since learning how to operate a gramophone – were already in evidence on their last studio outing, ‘Electric Café’ [Nov. 1986 and don’t even think ‘The Mix (’91 Remixes)’] – but we refused to believe.
And partially we were right. ‘Tour de France Soundtracks’ is good in parts, even invigorating. But, is that enough after taking all this time? Alas, no… Electro-pioneers, who influenced Hip-hop and techno scenes as much as the ‘club-culture’, Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider have spent too many years inside their Kling Klang studio fortress, for anyone’s good. All three ‘Etape’ cuts of the title track, with ‘Prologue’ and ‘Chrono’, use the same phrase to explore different sonic dimensions that, although gliding effortlessly, are far off the ‘yellow’ jersey pace.
These five pieces were supposed to inspire similar feelings of drama, excitement and intensity as the race itself. Well, it doesn’t match the ‘Autobahn’ evoked hormonal-displacement that almost made one jump off ‘Trans-Europe Express’! Post-race, ‘Vitamin’ picks up pace (and reactivates the Muse chip) to toy with a funky base pulsing under a light and repetitive motif. Things improve even more on ‘Aero Dynamik’ while ‘Electro Kardiogramm’ is just vintage ‘Werk! ‘La Forme’ then takes almost 9 minutes of pedestrian meandering to get nowhere in no particular hurry, sounding like having been made by a tribute band on an off-day.
It all ends with the original version of ‘Tour de France’ and you realise that all they wanted to achieve they had done during the original 5:10 timing! It re-locates the old ingredients that made it more instinctive – between November 1973 and Nov. 1975 three full and groundbreaking LPs were released – wider ranging tonal floats, more mesmerising rhythm salads, the sonic mountain higher and deeper electro kinesis.
It would have been utopian to imagine that Kraftwerk could deliver genre-setting music like they had 30 years ago: there is no more purity, high-aesthetic, precision, minimalism and pedantic detailing that greeted us on ‘Kometenmelodie’ back in the day. Although Kraftwerk can never make anything catastrophically bad, the trouble here is that half of it is – commonplace nowadays. They’ve always been innovators, avant-garde of forward-thinkers even, and their back-catalogue set the standard with pieces that defined its era and forged the digi-autobahn to the future, more than once.
What is very much possible is that the two principle Kraftwerk-ers, with Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz, have made exactly the record they wanted: naff, blandish and breezy to compliment the times it emulates, analyses, soundtracks… It is less futuristic and more zeitgeist whereas they always appeared to stand for scientific/Sci-Fi outlook and hundreds of horses under the bonnet, thus making this feel like… well, it is true – a ride on a bike.
If this is Hutter/Schneider’s take on reality, shades of the past future aside, it is like ‘Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines’: nice SFX, killer stunts, ace CGI, great set-pieces but the plot is largely recycled.
7/10
SaschaS
5-6-2005
Kraftwerk’s album ‘Tour de France Soundtracks’ is released 04 August 2003 on EMI
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