Here are three early-1970s tracks from two German rock bands that came up on YouTube last night. I think they’ll be a nice surprise for anyone here who likes that kind of music and an even nicer surprise for anyone who might have liked these groups back in the day.
The first is Frumpy. Reminded me of Steppenwolf and Yes. Singer Inga Rumpf (the band’s name is a take on her last name) is a real powerhouse. Have a listen and you’ll be surprised.
The other group is CAN. Weird, but by the end of the track, weird in a good way, at least I thought so. Reminded me of Red Hot Chili Peppers at times. Bass player kind of freaks me out. Pretty solid stuff, IMO, considering the year it was made.
I also recently (well, a couple years ago) discovered Frumpy via YouTube. I’ve been hooked ever since, but I’m spacing out my acquisition of the albums in order to savour them more.
I like CAN a lot (side note: my Alexa device simply can’t understand that CAN is the name of a band, and it took me a while to figure out how to stream their albums). But Frumpy is new to me, I’m glad you posted this!
Can is fantastic, particularly the album Tago Mago. I also enjoy the band Neu! from that general “Krautrock” scene. (Wait, do we still call it that? Seems like it should be construed a tad offensive.) If you know the band Stereolab, you’ll recognize Neu!’s influence on them. You might even catch a bit of Smashing Pumpkins’s”Cherub Rock” intro in this one, or in the opening track of their first album.
Don’t sweat it, we call that genre Krautrock ourselves. I’m a big fan, but only really got into it in the last ten years or so, when I was able to access a lot of albums via streaming which were hard to get in the 80s and 90s. I love Neu!, and they were influental both on British post punk as later on post rock. Here are two tracks that show where these influences came from:
Another band I can recommend is Amon Düül II. One song stunned me the most, an outtake from their album Wolf City, which is proto trip hop from 1972!
Another great German band that usually is counted under the Krautrock label is Birth Control. They sound very different to the kraut bands that pioneered electronic sounds like Neu!, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Cluster or Faust though, and had more of a classic hard rock sound with tinges of prog, with a dominating organ, very similar to their contemporaries Deep Purple and Uriah Heep. This is probably their most famous song:
Pretty solid stuff, IMO, considering the year it was made.
