This looks like a novelty record. There is a punning title (on The Man-Machine); a cover that mimics the original, with band members arranged on a staircase in red shirts and black ties, all in service of the high concept: the music of Kraftwerk arranged for steel pans. By all rights, this should be something to be laughed at in a record shop but listened to once, if at all.
But this is one of those rare recreations (Tubular Brass, a brass band recreation of Mike Oldfield’s most famous work, is another) that work in their own right and shed a new light on the original. Pan Machine cherry-picks the highlights of the Düsseldorf electronic conceptualists, from “The Model” to “The Robots”, but also finds room for early Ralf und Florian rarity “Tanzmusik”. The pans, with their wobbling timbre, both do and do not duplicate the shimmer of early synthesisers. The arrangements, lacking the deadpan vocals that hovered in an uneasy ironic space (were they serious? Or self-parody?) reveal the beauty of the melodies: the gap between the low basslines and the high patterns on “The Model”, including the shiver in the last refrain; the way the hook in “Computer Love” — famously appropriated, with permission, by Coldplay for “Talk” — is answered a moment later by a mirror phrase in which the bass pans shift up a joyous third; the clockwork intricacy of “Tour de France”. Even “Neon Lights”, discomfortingly kitsch in Kraftwerk’s version, here achieves something of the twilight technicolour of The Blue Nile.
Natacha Atlas is one of the unsung, or at least undersung heroines of Britain’s world music scene, bringing charisma to everyone from Transglobal Underground and Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart to overlooked projects such as Ghostland. Her solo albums have recently tended to blend the music of her Egyptian heritage with 1940s tropes. Strange Days (Whirlwind) is billed as a “darkly dystopian Arabic-infused jazz fantasy”, and indeed it has the air of a paranoid nightclub, Atlas’s trademark microtonal flutter drifting like the smoke in a Herman Leonard photo over Alcyona Mick’s piano and Samy Bishai’s strings. A cover of James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World”, lithe with double bass, and a guest vocal from Joss Stone, jousting with brassy stabs, on “Words Of A King”, are both folded seamlessly into the blue mood.
★★★★☆
‘Pan Machine’ is released by Om Swagger
"steel" - Google News
January 03, 2020 at 08:27PM
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Ebony Steel Band: Pan Machine — the music of Kraftwerk arranged for steel pans - Financial Times
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