Appropriately, the album was recorded in the summertime, in
balmy Cologne, just after the band had returned from vacation. The relaxed
atmosphere resulted in a record somewhat at odds with the band’s previous
output; where once their improvisatory sound had been clattering and off-kilter
- Monster Movie and Tago Mago had been comprised largely of built-up tension and
shocks to the nervous system - Future Days was tranquil, the sound of water rushing over rocks downstream.
Water is the album’s primary elemental concern right from
the first and title track, in which a gentle, repetitive rhythm evokes the
feeling of drifting away on a raft in the ocean. The track is unbelievably
sparse, the guitar weaving back and forth over a clipped, metronomic beat, with a one-note bass part emerging periodically as if from mist. Singer Damo Suzuki hovers over the
track like a ghost, with his usual broken English/Japanese/German/Nonsense
lyrics delivered within an airy, sing-song melody.
As in most Can music, the effect of this track and the
following “Spray”, is to induce a trancelike, hypnotic effect. Or to at least
disorient the listener. “Spray” approximates the sound of deep-sea diving, full
of bubbling water and swirling life. Its floaty, up-and-down feel is so
drastic that at least two people that I’ve played the album for have asked me
to turn it off because it was making them dizzy.
After the album’s single, “Moonshake”, a track so groovy and
space-age-bachelor-pad-like that Stereolab seem to have based the better part
of their recording career on it, comes the album’s tour-de-force, the sidelong
“Bel Air”. Using ingredients from the first side, including the watery
atmosphere and circular rhythmic patterns, “Bel Air” takes off into more
expansive territory. Alternately dreamy and turbulent, the track moves through
several suite-like sections, all held together by Suzuki’s beautiful, dreamike
vocal melody. The obvious comparison is Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”. Both tracks might work as a soundtrack to the "Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite" section of 2001: A Space Odyssey, though where
Floyd were definitely drifting into space Can seem to be dealing with more earthly, if similarly
mysterious elements.
Or not. Where one listener hears the ocean the other might hear the stratosphere. And Future Days is an open-ended album, elliptical in a good way. And fascinating for all of its contradictions. It’s both
inward-looking and exploratory – “Spray”, evocative as it is of movement
through blood vessels, has always reminded me of Fantastic Voyage, with the scientists shrinking down so they can
travel through a human body. Elsewhere, the album is both static, as on the
shimmering peacefulness of the title track, and full of peaks and valleys, as in “Bel Air”’s movements from drifting bliss to roiling whirlpool of sound.
Mostly the album endures for its utility. I believe it works
most naturally in the summer, but it’s probably equally effective in any other
season – it might work as a nice respite from winter’s cold, or it might
provide regenerative power in the fall, when everything is dying. It also fits
most any mood, easing melancholy or reflecting back the glow of happiness.
Or, like almost any good art, it can be a means of escape –
the whole album could be heard as the sound of floating away. Who doesn’t need
to float away every now and again?
