Moebius & Plank - Rastakrautpasta

Moebius & Plank
Rastakrautpasta


Released 1981 on Sky Records
Reviewed by Julian Cope, 15/03/2000ce


This is an album of slobbering and drooling genius. Seven pieces of emptyspacehead on-the-beat Krautfunk. The album opens with 'News', samples of TV news over a heavy bass slide-trombone groove. Actually, there's no bass slide-trombone at all but that's the effect created. The title track is the funniest dude-ingest track since the grooves on Lou Reed’s 1978 album Street Hassle, another curve-ball out of nowhere. This inner-city Bavarian reggae loads Lee Perry absurdities on top of Faust absurdities and combines them all with the New York of Dillinger's Cocaine in my Brain. Huge synthesizer melodies with catchy-as-hell harmonies, some of which make you grit your teeth, over a garagey white 'There's a Riot Goin' On rhythm track. The classic rock 'n' roller monster is 'Feedback 66'; the title alone would have made Suicide cream. The track itself growls along like electro-Stooges, similar to the machine sounds of Suicide’s second album. And ugly feedback (mike feedback...not even guitar feedback) all-the-way. If Moebius & Plank were not geniuses of the Teutonic-kind, they could not have attempted such a speculative foray as Rastakrautpasta. But when it falls on its ass it doesn’t matter because, success or failure, it’s always funny. Ha, they had no World Music aspirations, thank fuck.


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