MECHANICAL FAILURE
Pioneers of electronic pop, Kraftwerk quite rightly continue to be regarded
as one of the most influential acts of all-time. Their singularly Germanic
approach; aloof, enigmatic and clinical, fused with divine melody and
extraordinarily prescient futuristic vision, made them an iconic figurehead for every
subsequent generation of knob-twiddling, techno-fixated, synth-loving music
makers. They virtually created the contemporary soundtrack of the last 20 or so
years, but through their determined isolation from the music business and
attendant media circus, Kraftwerk have always been viewed as outsiders.
At the height of Punk in 1977, they fashioned Trans-Europe Express; a
sparkling celebration of travel and technology with a sleeve inspired by the Art Deco
movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Sublime tunes wrought from motherboards and
occasionally laced with emotionless, minimalistic Aryan vocals about Showroom
Dummies and a Hall Of Mirrors.
Serendipity briefly occurred at the dawn of the Eighties, as the synthesizer
was in-vogue and The Human League, O.M.D. and others directly inspired by
Kraftwerk's glacial soundscapes were lording it over the UK charts. A seminal 1978
nugget from The Man Machine, The Model, reached No.1 in 1982 in unusual
circumstances, having been merely the B-side to a single from their 1981 album
Computer World before its rekindled popularity forced EMI to flip the record
several months into its lifespan. A spate of re-issues followed, some of them
making the lower reaches of the Top 40, before the next new Kraftwerk material
appeared in the late summer of 1983. A mooted album had just been shelved, but a
one-off single - Tour De France - was released.
Since then, there has been very little in the way of activity from Ralph
Hutter, Florian Schneider and their studiobound cohorts. 1986's Electric Cafe
barely registered with the public, and for the first time Kraftwerk appeared to
have taken their collective eye off the ball. Allowing your work's relevance to
be rendered obsolete by the present is the curse of the pioneering futurist,
and to all intents and purposes Kraftwerk have been treading water for more
than two decades. Simply recycling themselves by tinkering indefinitely with
their own established bleeps and clunks represents a baffling state of creative
inertia. The Mix, from 1991, gently reworked some well-known Kraftwerk tracks to
moderate commercial success, but as the only album to emerge in seventeen
years it raised more questions than it answered by temporarily breaking their
self-imposed exile. Nine years later, and another no-strings single - Expo 2000 -
hardly allayed fears that their powers were on the wane.
At last, however, there is a brand new Kraftwerk album. Of sorts. To mark the
centenary of France's famous cycle race (and the 20th anniversary of the Tour
De France single itself, one assumes), we have Tour De France Soundtracks.
One of the tracks is the TDF original, the rest is approximately 50 minutes of
unremarkable noodling devoid of anything so bold as an identifiable tune. All
traces of personality have been processed out of the limited, robotic vocals,
such as they are, something which earlier Kraftwerk masterpieces so classily
avoided by leaving just enough expression intact. The music is equally bereft of
variety; this is an album which the most basic of computers could come up
with. Whatever might have happened to the muse which brought the world Neon
Lights, Autobahn, Radioactivity, The Model and the rest before disappearing after
1983, it certainly didn't manifest itself again here on Soundtracks. Closing
the album with the mesmeric original version, as the endless monotony finally
gives way to a wonderfully familiar sense of magic, just accentuates the
disappointment at how one of the truly important acts in contemporary recording
history can have sunk to this level of artistic redundancy.
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