KRAFTWERK - Trans Europe Express 2LP (colour vinyl)

Special edition colour vinyl.

Highly recommended.

Trans Europe Express is testament to Seventies cultural optimism, in particular the belief in a 'Europe as one' rebuilding itself from the ashes of a ruinous World War caused by petty nationalisms. The album is a celebration of a Europe without frontiers and passports.

If Kraftwerk's 1975 hit album and single Autobahn celebrated the joys of travelling without arriving in the humble car then Trans Europe Express swapped the German motorway for the grander pan-European landscape of the continent's rail system. But the theme remains constant: movement and rhythm. As a concept album Trans Europe Express revisits familiar Kraftwerk themes of travel, technology, alienation in the modern world and the blurring of the divide between man and a facsimile of man.

The musical technology on this album is ancient yet the music doesn't sound dated. The otherworldly synth sounds are eerie on some tracks, classical, almost ecclesiastical on others, like an aching, sighing angelic chorus. While in the clanking of the track "Metal on Metal" you can follow a direct line to the early Eighties industrial percussion of Einstürzende Neubauten, turned by Depeche Mode into 'music for the masses' in their own metal bashing Construction Time Again period.