There’s something to be said for a band that sounds like they have fun playing together. If you are familiar with the most well-known names in Krautrock — Amon Duul II, Kraftwerk, Neu!, Can, and Faust—then you can appreciate that this particular period in German music isn’t exactly known for bands with a light-hearted sense of humor. So imagine my surprise after hearing Guru Guru whip through a 13-minute medley that ends with a tribute to Eddie Cochran. I guess Germans did have a good time. Who knew?
What you may expect from a band that jammed with Amon Duul II and Can is a moody, atonal mind-fuck of an album. What you actually get is a view of the German equivalent to rock pranksters Frank Zappa, The Residents, Ween, or even (gulp) Primus. Don’t let those comparisons scare you away, though. Guru Guru don’t sound like any of the aforementioned groups (save for maybe Zappa at times), but they do have two things in common with all of them: a damaged sense of humor, and the musical ability to melt your brain if they so desire.
Guru Guru’s first cut, “Samantha’s Rabbit,” starts off with awkwardly propulsive drumming before settling into a hybrid between the fractured melodies of early Pink Floyd and the more traditional blooz-rawk of Cream. However, it’s the song structures that truly throw the listener for a loop. When things become too pedestrian, the band stops on a dime and heads to the polar opposite of where you may have thought they were going. Perverse? Maybe. Interesting? Definitely.
As the album progresses, it becomes increasingly surreal, as if the band is living in a self-imposed psychedelic fantasy. “Woman Drum” sounds like the trio has imagined themselves sitting in the clouds, smoking hash out of a hookah with Little Richard and Chuck Berry. “Der Elektrolurch” is all tribal toms and deftly plucked electric guitar that conjures up a collaboration between Popol Vuh and the Grateful Dead, before devolving into a Faust-like mush of disjointed electronics and spoken word. The band then comes full-circle to kick out some echoed arena-rock histrionics that will make you wonder if they seriously wanted to rock you, or if they’re just taking the piss out of the musical trends of their era.
On the other hand, with Guru Guru, trying to figure out whether or not the band is joking is hardly the point. It takes a certain type of album to remind you that having a good time is all that should really matter. The music here doesn’t blow (sober) minds, and you definitely won’t develop an emotional attachment to it, but in its own way Guru Guru is a mind-fuck album in a genre packed with mind-fuck albums, just not in the way that you were expecting it to be.