Kraftwerk - Minimum-Maximum

Genre electronica Publisher Astralwerks External Links Official Website Astralwerks

Give me Neu!'s motorik pulse, Faust's Dadaist bigtop party, or Can's late-night, prog-jam sprawl any day of the week; when it comes to krautrock's Big Four, Kraftwerk is the band I've never been able to love quite as unconditionally as the rest. Blame it on the quartet's immaculately manicured, robotic public persona, the warm yet sterile keyboards employed in their precise, vintage cyber-pop, the android-by-way-of-Germany vocals simultaneously poking fun at and celebrating present-tense banalities and what many imagined, circa the Ford and Carter administrations, the present century might sound like: man and machine co-existing in creepy lockstep synthesis. For all their utopian expanse and USSR poster-swiping, sleeve-cover cool, Kraftwerk's studio recordings suffer from an isolated, labcoat detachment that prevents me from pulling them out more than, say, once a year.

The genius of Minimum-Maximum - 22 tracks and two discs strong, culled from 11 live performances over the last couple years - is twofold. First and foremost, the presence of fanatical, ticket-waving homo sapiens necessarily impinges on the music's innate quasi-humanity even if it doesn't directly affect the (oft remixed or reconfigured here) content - frequent bursts of applause and cheer eruptions when intros to favorites are recognized, a song shifts from one simplistic-yet-scintillating, pre-set movement to another, or at blessed random delivers Kraftwerk from the cult vacuum they often seem to exist within to a shared, beloved phenomenality. Second, Minimum-Maximum doubles as a sort off career highlight reel cum non-stop future-schlock love-in, as songs are mixed to segue smoothly from one to the next. Granted, the band's catalogue isn't anything like equally represented -- you get most of Computer World and The Man-Machine, a lot of Tour De France, title tracks only from Radioactivity, Trans-Europe Express, and Autobahn, and nada from Kraftwerk, Electric Cafe, and Ralf & Florian -- but this is likely everything the casual Kraftwerk fan will ever need to own anyway, in one tidy package that at times is reminiscent of the trippy, live half of 90s electronica overlords The Orb's greatest hits package.