Bye, it has been great for the most part but now I am off to annother part of the world to make my f...
Bye, it has been great for the most part but now I am off to annother part of the world to make my fortune.
Member since:24.04.2003
Reviews:383
Members who trust:97
This is Kraftwerk’s first album since 1986’s Electric Café, released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the famous bike race of the same name. The lethargic work rate has been in part responsible for the disappearance of the two electronic percussionists Wolfgang Flur and Karl Bartos and the as a result their influence on the music is obvious more of that later.
Since their inception Kraftwerk have been obsessed with the merger of Man and Machine, and this album is fitting tribute to that concept, what purer merger between man and machine is there than cycling.
The album starts off with a prologue then 3 different new versions of Tour de France, a superb mixture of Trance and European techno, which sets the mood for the rest of the album with each song paying reference to another aspect of cycling.
Throughout the album you are drawn in to the whole sound and as ever Kraftwerk appear to have yet again mastered the art of making electronic music that causes an emotional response, true genius if you ask me. The use of a vocoder for all the vocals creates the feeling of man (with a soul) and machine (soulless) combined as one, which perfectly matches the concept of cycling.
The whole thing is spoiled though at the end of the album by a rendition of the original version of Tour De France which was released on the 80th anniversary of the tour when they had two electronic percussionists and you are brought back to what this band once were. You once again hear the complex rhythms that they used to create, and this counter pointed against the minimal arrangements of the synths. This is what they excelled at making perfect pop tunes which despite being on the surface souless had increadable depth, and drew the listener incontrolably into their world of the man machine.
In all it is a pretty dam good album though and a welcome return to the fold hopefully we will not have to wait for nearly another 20 years until the next.
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