Can’s second album, Soundtracks, according to the back cover of that album, wasn’t their second. This was a collection of pieces they’d done for movies, most of them gigs arranged by their founder, Irmin Schmidt, the one band member with a full-time career as an academic and teacher. They’d changed to a new singer, Damo Suzuki, a Japanese teenager who had reached Germany, after a short time in a Swedish commune. They’d lost Malcolm Mooney, though his voice is here on two tracks. The most popular song from this album, on Spotify, is “She Brings The Rain,” a quiet jazz-adjacent song with no drums. Mooney sings like a real hep cat, less tormented than usual. Some find this track “romantic,” some think it is a complete piss-take. Suzuki, though, drives Can to find something completely separate from anything else happening anywhere. Singing in very idiosyncratic English, and with emotional emphases that are impossible to predict, Suzuki was as uncanny (sorry) as everything else around him. All of the shorter songs here (especially “Tango Whiskyman”) are great but “Mother Sky” is where a whole other thing begins. Suzuki says only a few words, mostly repeating one line: “I say madness is too pure like mother sky.” (The British label, Too Pure, took their name from this lyric, and one of their bands, Th’ Faith Healers, covered “Mother Sky.”) Suzuki kind of sneaks up on his own words, reciting them a little bit lost in the intonation. He has another, deeply anguished register, but this is his moonwalker zone, spelunker on the far shores of consciousness, finding the purity of his own madness. Even Schmidt, not given to much noisiness, makes some of his most psychotic keyboard shrieks here. Karoli also kind of solos for the entire song, which is neither here nor there. He’s great when he mirrors Czukay’s steady octaves, hanging out in a single note.

– Sasha Frere-Jones