Monster Movie (1969)

Artist: Can
Release Year: 1969

Rating: 6/10

Track Listing: 1) Father Cannot Yell; 2) Mary, Mary So Contrary; 3) Outside My Door; 4) You Doo Right.

Before their "classic" period with Damo Suzuki, Can had Malcolm Mooney on the mic, and the character he lent to the band was one of raving devotion, both to the music and to whatever subject he decided to vocalize about.  All these songs may have more or less the signature Eastern-drone-meets-African-groove elements injected into the rock formula, but Mooney's pleading, raspy-voiced presence turned the whole product into something of a primitive religious devotional.  Yes, although it was Suzuki who claimed to sing in the "language of the Stone Age", Mooney managed to capture the desperation of the frightened, starving, sexually frustrated primate brain almost as well, albeit with a more hazy and dreamy surrender to the "ritual" atmosphere provided by his bandmates.

"Father Cannot Yell" starts out restless and paranoid, with Mooney babbling out that eerie monologue that almost becomes a verse-- but good luck paying full attention in the midst of that droning, screeching guitar freakout that clearly took cues from The Velvet Underground's early records.  By the time the guitars die down and the rhythm section moves to the fore, the vocals have devolved into a wordless mantra, as if it were more important to keep up his place in the jam than to deliver any actual meaning.  I can't usually say that a singer going "ah-uhuh-uh-ahh" for several minutes keeps my attention, but there you go.  Just keep the guitar solos a little more condensed and this is a bigger win for the band.  "Outside My Door " is cool too, I guess, though they clearly ripped the guitar riff from "Lucifer Sam".  This is where you'll find the closest thing to a conventional melody on the album, even though it's still cut up with yelping interjections from Mooney before the guitars come in to bury him in the groove again.

Ironically, the most tripped-out and dangerous-sounding song on here is the one with the nursery rhyme lyrics.  Despite its softer sound, "Mary, Mary So Contrary" has all the drone of the previous song, but this time with a woozy, swaying melody drenched in feedback and accentuated with stinging guitars.  It's excellent, and I'd almost rank this dark, portentous song alongside the likes of "Paperhouse".

Really the whole point of the twenty-minute "You Doo Right" is that it's but a snippet of the original six hours of continuous jamming from which it resulted.  I don't know how far along in the session this track was clipped from, but it was clearly long enough for Malcolm Mooney's voice to devolve into halfhearted yips and exhausted subvocalizations.  Still, I can't be too upset at the guy's commitment as he wails on and on like a primitive man in a trance, as if he's doing a desperate ritual dance for the harvest.  So, fully enrapturing it is not, but there's certainly an appreciation on my end, and the fact that he had to leave the band soon afterward due to his mental health is, shall we say, another contextual amplifier.

Overall, this is an unstable, sometimes frustrating cauldron of paranoid grooves that came well ahead of its time.  The cool effects and general flexibility of later records had not yet set in, so the sound is limited and a bit monotonous with little to break the sludgy feel throughout.  There's nothing keeping me from enjoying the best moments, but why put this one on regularly when you have Tago Mago?