Category: Guru Guru

The quirky cover of Guru Guru’s Känguru – a mama and her joey adrift on the ice, with curious speech and thought bubbles – tells you all you need to know about this Krautrock heavy hitter. Their message is simple: our music is weird and fun and inscrutable. Känguru feels less a product of its circumstances and more like a beam from some kosmische asteroid: four songs of heady, rapturous, meandering rock. They’re jammy but structured, punctuated by climaxes and build-ups, vibe shifts and open space. But it’s about the journey, not the destination: get on the ice floe and float along, man…

Guru Guru aren’t the most celebrated of Krautrockers, but this 1971 live recording puts the lie many of the common and naive Krautrock narratives: not motorik enchanters but psychedelic shredders, not minimalists but maximalist noise makers, not anti-American but celebrants of Bo Diddley! It’s a miracle a German radio station was there to capture this killer performance.