Album Review

The release of Kraftwerk’s “The Catalogue”, eight digitally remastered albums from 1973-2003 has been long awaited, for such a pioneering band it has been a mystery why they had waited so long to remaster such a substantial back catalogue, however if you know anything about Kraftwerk it’s no surprise. They are a group of meticulous genii, every aspect of their sound and public image has been carefully considered to a point of perfection. This quote from founder Ralf Hütter on the release of “The Catalogue” says it all:

We’ve been digitally transferring all of Kraftwerk’s original recordings and sound sources from our badly degrading master tapes while our engineers, Fritz and Henning, have been working in parallel to remaster our early albums for re-release. So for the first time, our recordings will be available in crisp, clear Kling Klang sound with all the fold-out covers and images our label at the time either messed up or wouldn’t pay for. There will be some alternate mixes of tracks and some unedited versions, but unfortunately we don’t have much unreleased material. We never recorded extra songs or twenty different versions of the same song. We would complete a song and then move forward, always keeping very focused on one Kling Klang project at a time.

Each album on this remastered series is worth serious appreciation, “The Man-Machine” represents the band at perhaps their most commercial and approachable, their catchiest and most recognizable songs are found on this album originally released in 1978. “The Model”, three years after it’s original release a UK number one single, and “The Robots” were such future pop songs for their time, distant relatives of their parts can be found in thousands of recent electro-dance crossover acts, Justice, La Roux blah blah… 

The title of the album surmounts the thematic content of their entire musical output, Man against Machine, mankind’s constant struggle within this technological world. All of the musical themes, sounds and textures sync perfectly with the title, a complete piece of art, from the haunting vocoder call of “We are the Robots” on the opening track “The Robots”, the constant teleology of the electronic drums recalling automata, production lines, motorways, constant repetative movement, the twirling beautifully mechanical synth sounds especially on “Metropolis” (a nod to Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece) and “Neon Lights”, pointing to a haunting future for the earth whilst referencing the past. 

The constructivist referencing in the cover art is another example of how perfectly congruent every cog of the Kraftwerk machine is with each other. The red, back and white lines, the communist overtones of the red shirts combined with the robotic emotionless faces they surround. 

This album will undoubtably go down as one of the greatest and most influential of all time.