Send "Kraftwerk " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Kraftwerk are a band trapped in the vast frame of their apparent influence. Aptly for a group so fascinated by travel they enjoy an image as the ultimate electronic pioneers-- "the reason music sounds like it does today," as one BBC documentary put it. Let's take for granted then that it's impossible to imagine modern pop music without Kraftwerk and try a more interesting thought experiment: Let's try to imagine Kraftwerk without modern pop. What if they'd released the same body of work and influenced nobody? Would it still sound as good?This box set is an opportunity to find out-- a remastered, sealed-off package of what Kraftwerk (or at least remaining founder Ralf Hutter) would like you to consider its canon. This starts with 1974's Autobahn. The three albums Kraftwerk made before are beloved of many fans, but the group routinely ignore them as inconvenient prologues charting the band's messy discovery of electronics. The Catalogue skips past these to give you a run of five consecutive masterpieces, two albums whose flaws are at least intriguing, and then 2003's very fine Tour De France. Most of these remasters are available as separate issues (due to licensing issues three of them aren't in the U.S.), but the box as a whole is as full a Kraftwerk story as you're likely to be officially offered. As such it invites you to consider their achievements and development in relation to themselves, not to wider history....full text |
| Noripcord |
| Honestly: guitars, guitars, guitars… where was music going to go once the Hippies went the gateway route, found coke and hit the discos? The Stooges and the MC5 were blazing loud and minimal trails away from Woodstock and into the depths of Detriot depravity: Kick out the jams, motherfucker! The forgotten boys had to search and destroy because peace died in Altamont and The Who was writing rock operas. So, with a motorized whir and a synthesized honk, Autobahn arrived and put Germany ahead of everyone else clamoring for the Jetson-ized ideal, technology now infiltrating the beloved pop paradigm with predictions of cultural dependency delivered upon us with text book recitation and appropriately robotic candor. Kraftwerk ushered in our Computer World and music hasn’t been the same since, an ambiguous fact that’s proven both pro and no. The Catalogue, Kraftwerk’s seminal eight-album body of work, (Autobahn, Radio-Activity, Trans Europe Express, The Man Machine, Computer World, Techno Pop, The Mix and Tour De France), will see the light of day as a set of newly re-mastered gems, five years after the promise of their release had initially been made. Individual re-masters were released on October 6th, but only five of them are available in the U.S.: Autobahn, Radio-Activity, Trans Europe Express, The Man Machine and Tour De France....full text |
| Thequietus |
| The first time I heard Kraftwerk it was like a scorch of hot metal, a bolt of white light to the mind. I was 16, an indie girl from an industrial town, an unlikely target for machine music made by four men from Düsseldorf. Chris, my best friend and partner-in-crime in small-town escapism, had come round as usual on a damp Friday night, with four cans of Fosters that would go straight to our heads, and some dusty CDs he had bought with his pocket money. Usually we'd listen to Teenage Fanclub, Blur, or some dull, cut-price grunge, but this album looked different. An indigo-blue and luminous yellow cover; a monochrome robot with wild, widening eyes; a title, The Mix, set in Ceefax-style building blocks. I was scared of it, somehow, genuinely puzzled by its strangeness. And then its first track whirred, sputtered, shot into life, filling the corners of my mum's old front room – a dark hole full of bibles and commemorative plates to old collieries – with something bright, clear, and incredibly modern. It sharpened the room's old-fashioned edges; it set my synapses alight. And slowly but surely, Kraftwerk became mine. In the years that followed, my obsession kept building, like a line of charge on a battery. I scoured old second-hand shops for their LPs on cassette – the correct medium of the future for them, I thought geekily – and wrote essays about them in my media studies class. In 1997, I joined a gang of pilled-up halfwits on a coach to Tribal Gathering, keeping myself cleanly awake with strong coffee and egg butties not to miss the band I loved live. I still remember going in their tent with good old Chris at my side two hours early, joined only by a few, anoraked middle-aged Germans. But Christ, it was worth it. That gig remains the greatest thing I have ever seen – a life-changing explosion of neon lights and numbers, colours and sounds, feelings and sensations....full text |
| Thequietus |
| The first time I heard Kraftwerk it was like a scorch of hot metal, a bolt of white light to the mind. I was 16, an indie girl from an industrial town, an unlikely target for machine music made by four men from Düsseldorf. Chris, my best friend and partner-in-crime in small-town escapism, had come round as usual on a damp Friday night, with four cans of Fosters that would go straight to our heads, and some dusty CDs he had bought with his pocket money. Usually we'd listen to Teenage Fanclub, Blur, or some dull, cut-price grunge, but this album looked different. An indigo-blue and luminous yellow cover; a monochrome robot with wild, widening eyes; a title, The Mix, set in Ceefax-style building blocks. I was scared of it, somehow, genuinely puzzled by its strangeness. And then its first track whirred, sputtered, shot into life, filling the corners of my mum's old front room – a dark hole full of bibles and commemorative plates to old collieries – with something bright, clear, and incredibly modern. It sharpened the room's old-fashioned edges; it set my synapses alight. And slowly but surely, Kraftwerk became mine. In the years that followed, my obsession kept building, like a line of charge on a battery. I scoured old second-hand shops for their LPs on cassette – the correct medium of the future for them, I thought geekily – and wrote essays about them in my media studies class. In 1997, I joined a gang of pilled-up halfwits on a coach to Tribal Gathering, keeping myself cleanly awake with strong coffee and egg butties not to miss the band I loved live. I still remember going in their tent with good old Chris at my side two hours early, joined only by a few, anoraked middle-aged Germans. But Christ, it was worth it. That gig remains the greatest thing I have ever seen – a life-changing explosion of neon lights and numbers, colours and sounds, feelings and sensations....full text |
Kraftwerk lyrics
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