Of all the great German bands from the early sixties and seventies that were attached to the unfortunate name “Krautrock,” Faust were without doubt the weirdest. The Hamburg collective threw psych rock, early electronics, musique concrete, avant-garde classical music, and any other notion that came into their brains into a bucket, rattled the contents around, then poured them all over the speakers, letting anything in the way of the deluge survive as best it could. Over the decades, the still-active band (a term which seems inadequate for this free-floating collection of pranksters, musicians, and misfits) has influenced industrial music, ambient music, electronic music, progressive rock, hip-hop, noise rock, comedy (we assume), socially conscious art movements (no doubt), and who knows what else. So it never hurts to check in on the catalog and bring it back into print from time to time, as has been done by German avant rock-loving label Bureau B for a new set of reissues.
Originally released in 1971, Faust wasted no time in disabusing any notions of it being a conventional “rock” record. “Meadow Meal” opens with a clanking sound collage, segues into a semi-pastoral guitar arpeggio, adds horns that imitate a ship calling out through the fog, indulges some cheeky vocalists singing and speaking parodic flower-power lyrics, and rolls along with fuzz guitar, a demi-funk rhythm section, storm effects, and a lonely organ. All of that flows straight into “Miss Fortune,” an epic cut that follows a more straightforward musical line, allowing some circular guitar riffs to open the door to a hypnotic stratosphere. At least at first – once the clinking percussion, buzzing electronics, and studio trickery usher in the farting synthesizers, barroom piano, semi-operatic vocals, walloping drum groove, and some audio verite that sounds like the Firesign Theater in a trash compactor, all bets are off. By that point, the horny, noisy, zany “Why Don’t You Eat Your Carrots?” sounds almost conventional. Faust is acid rock with a case of the wackies.
Recorded a mere six months after Faust, Faust So Far – released in 1972 – sounds like the band’s attempt to play it straight – if by straight you mean John Fahey crossed with Steve Reich discussing Gentle Giant while fucking the ghost of Syd Barrett. The jagged “It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl” was surely someone’s idea of a single, but the metallic (by which we mean the substance, not the musical style) guitar repetitions and driving beat (one of Faust’s few submissions to motorik) would not have set early seventies’ radio programmers’ rods a-twirl. (Faust had to settle for prefiguring post punk instead.) Neither would the casually tuned acoustic guitar meanderings of “On the Way to Abamaee,” the silly acid pop of “I’ve Got My Car and TV,” or the mutated classic rock of the title track, all of which are more accessible than anything on Faust, but only if you’re a time traveling college radio DJ from around 1992. The groovy(ish) “No Harm,” with its noisy scratch guitar, ranted vocals, and thudding rhythm, is the only epic here; otherwise, the bite-size chunks of strangeness make one wonder if a clueless record company insisted on Faust delivering something more easily digestible. Mission accomplished, I guess?
Skipping over 1973’s collage-heavy The Faust Tapes, Bureau B takes us straight to 1973’s other Faust album. IV makes the same attempt as So Far in that it tries to make Faust’s convention-agnostic madness palatable to the soon-to-be commodified FM rock radio. The deliriously eclectic results are about the same: acid-fried sound collage (“Just a Second Picnic On a Frozen River, Deuxieme Tableau”), Stereolab-anticipating lounge-a-delia (“Jennifer”), scorched folk rock (“It’s a Bit of a Pain”), a Pink Floyd parody (“Giggy Smile”), demented pop (“The Sad Skinhead”), whatever “Laeuft Heissdas, es laeuft oder es kommt bald Laeuft!” is, plus a single epic – the raging, nose-tweaking mantra “Krautrock.” If anything, the songs here are closer to psychedelic convention than avant insanity. But it’s still Faust, which means discordance and strangeness and sarcasm rule the day, and that none of it will show up anywhere near the mainstream, let alone on the next Nuggets compilation. Let’s face it – Faust fans would be disappointed if anything the band has done could easily fit on a collection representative of this or any era. Turn on your mind, get agitated, and run screaming down the street.
