I like ALL of Kraftwerk's albums up to "The Mix" (the latter included). That will be their last station for me. I never lost my respect for the group afterwards, but after their occasional (tribal) gatherings and life-support-machine-type line-ups during mid-90s onwards, I lost interest in most things they did/do recently. Because to me, it suddenly feels like a desperate attempt to keep the Kraftwerk name, regardless of who actually IS Kraftwerk.
And watching Ralf Hütter mentoring the three substitute colleagues replicating sounds that they didn't directly produce at the time of the original albums' making, everything about Kraftwerk now turns out to be illusive and predictable. Ralf, Karl, Wolfgang and Florian remain the key quartet that will sadly never happen again, due various reasons. Their living legend might continue in the future though, with results that we can only guess about.
The recent remasters, in my humble opinion, won't help the legend much either - despite some of its outstanding redesign and the fact Mute Records (which also lost some of its soul in the meantime to EMI) got the green light to include it in its impressive catalogue.
But I say "Electric Cafe" is my personal favourite, more for the sentimental reasons than the fact there is a better Kraftwerk album to that one - because discovering them through "Electric Cafe", my perception of music, or better - music taste, changed drastically. I learned throughout the years, "Electric Cafe" is other people's least favourite album, due lack of ideas. I think with it they did reach a creative peak, in both sound and image - speaking of which, "Electric Cafe" helped define Kraftwerk as a virtual entity from far away future where software lifeforms will prevail. The video to "Musique Non Stop" perfectly envisages this futuristic environment, frighteningly minimal at its modern extreme.
Getting back to the remastered catalogue, "Electric Cafe" now definitely is the least favourite amongst the remasters - given back its original title of "Techno Pop", the first three songs are still not properly indexed and the crime of including the single edit of "The Telephone Call" along with its dull counterpart called "Housephone", instead of the original album's amazing 8-minutes of phone-sex frustrations, makes me love the original "Electric Cafe" even more.
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