Landed is the pivot. It is the first Can album made on a new sixteen-track machine, with what the band called their first professional mix — cleaner, louder, more layered, and more like conventional rock than anything they had done. Some critics heard the beginning of the end; others heard a band adapting. Both are partly right. But whatever you make of the polish, Landed also contains Vernal Equinox, one of the fiercest and finest things Can ever recorded, which alone makes it worth the trip.

The short version

Their sixth studio album, recorded at Inner Space near Cologne and released in September 1975 on Virgin; six tracks, forty minutes. This is the four-piece that carried on after Damo Suzuki: Michael Karoli on guitar, violin and, now, lead vocals; Irmin Schmidt on keyboards; Holger Czukay on bass and engineering; and Jaki Liebezeit on drums. With Suzuki gone, Karoli fronts the band, delivering soft, dreamlike vocals across the song-based tracks. The album splits between rockier, more accessible songs and two long experimental instrumentals, Vernal Equinox and Unfinished, that reach back toward the sound-collage side of the band.

The professional mix

The big change here is technical, and it matters. Landed was the first Can album recorded on a state-of-the-art sixteen-track machine, replacing the two-track setup they had used through all their classic records, and the first to get a full studio mix — part of it handled with outside engineer Toby Robinson. The result is far cleaner and more layered than the primitive-sounding earlier albums, and it changed how the band worked from here on, letting them build parts up separately rather than capturing everything live in a room. That is the gift and the curse of Landed. Some hear the new clarity as a loss of the old telepathic magic, and argue the material was mixed too much like straight rock, with too much volume and fuzz. Others simply hear Can sounding, for once, hi-fi. It is the hinge between the band’s raw golden age and their glossier late period.

The sound

Two records in one. The song side is rockier and more accessible than Can had ever been, with seedy, propulsive grooves that carry shades of Lou Reed and Roxy Music and point forward to the art-punk of Pere Ubu and the Berlin records Iggy Pop would make a couple of years later. Karoli’s guitar is abrasive and up front, his vocals soft and abstract, and the band lock into tight, driving patterns. The other side is the experimental Can, the two long instrumentals working sound-collage and drift the way the previous album had. It is less mysterious than their peak work and more conventional in places, but it is rarely less than interesting, and when it catches fire it still sounds like no one else. Not their most magical record — but far from the write-off some make it.

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The songs

Full Moon on the Highway opens with abrasive fuzz guitar and a relentless beat, a driving rocker with a distinct edge. Half Past One is slower, built on chromatic keyboard vamps and Karoli’s languid, almost-spoken vocal. Hunters and Collectors is the eerie, controversial one, vocals to the fore and a hook that lodges in your head for days — it plainly anticipates Iggy Pop’s later Berlin work. Then Vernal Equinox: nearly nine minutes of instrumental fury, drums and guitar dominant, Karoli’s amplifier sounding ready to explode as he rips out some of the best solos of his career before a spacey passage opens up in the middle. For many it is the album’s masterpiece and one of the band’s greatest tracks. Red Hot Indians brings in saxophone and an Afrobeat-tinged pulse, and the thirteen-minute Unfinished closes the record as a blissed-out studio jam, built partly from a malfunctioning organ.

Reception and legacy

Landed is one of Can’s more divisive albums. Its critics see the professional mix as the moment the band’s dynamics began to ebb, and treat it as the start of a decline; its defenders point out that a decline containing Vernal Equinox and Unfinished is a strange kind of falling off. The truth sits between: this is a transitional record, cleaner and more conventional than the untouchable run before it, but still full of ideas and still unmistakably Can. It set the template — the polished, layered, Virgin-era sound — that the following album, Flow Motion, would carry toward outright pop. For anyone who has heard the classics, Landed is well worth investigating, if only to discover Vernal Equinox.

The verdict

For fans and the curious rather than the first stop — start with Ege Bamyasi or Future Days, then come here with an open mind. Take it as the pivot album: cleaner, rockier, uneven, and hiding at least one stone-cold classic. Play Vernal Equinox above all, then Hunters and Collectors and Unfinished. Then Future Days for the Suzuki-era peak just before it, Flow Motion for where the Virgin-era sound went next, and Neu! or Cluster for the wider scene. Not Can at their most magical — but home to one of the most ferocious tracks they ever cut.

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