Can – Future Days

Best 1973 press other than this one? Keen but not $1.2k keen

I assume that the United Artists Records vinyls which are repressings are all bootlegs?

Anybody have a printed insert they’re willing to part with?

There's an orange vinyl version of Tago Mago, a green version of Ege Bamyasi, how about a blue or purple version of Future Days?

Older issues are smoother in sound. Spoon reissues brighter. each have merit in the Can sound. You do no get the old tape hiss that is in some recordings, cause its gone now, needed in some places, not in others. the studio is part of the sound they recorded. Changed a little on the Spoon reissues, as the clean up has changed the studio sound.

This German 1st pressing really sounds unbelievably good. Great bass and overall dynamics. I was pleasantly surprised by this.

It might be worth pointing out that the remastered SACD edition of "Future Days", reissued in 2005, has added room ambience type reverb to the entire album.

All of the remastered reissues are quite heavily compressed, loud and have been treated with digital noise reduction. The early Can recordings will never sound "perfect", and in some cases these modern touches help a bit (like some extra bass boost on "Mushroom" on Tago Mago) but in most cases they tweaked them too much. Some people are obsessed with high quality needledrops of Can albums in their original first pressings, but few seem to have actually compared them with the old Spoon CDs from the late 80s. I just did and those old CD reissues are often very close to how the original LPs sound. I've filed away the SACDs and went back to my old Spoon CDs.

Very exciting update: I found my old 1989 Spoon CD reissue of "Future Days", and the added reverb is present there as well. Have a listen to Damo's vocals on the title track: on the original LP they're completely dry and very upfront. On the CD reissues they have a room ambience with a digital sheen, giving them a completely different feel.

This album was the beginning of the end of the classic Can era. Holger had worked so hard, practically single-handededly, on the editing of the first albums that by Future Days his editing razor blade had become blunt.
Bel Air is so in need of cutting that I don't know where to begin. It's not a Can track that I enjoy so perhaps the less said the better. I can see from comments here that people rate it so all I can say is "in matters of taste there is no dispute".
It's too long, unstructured and lacks discipline for my taste.

The title track is probably the best track Can ever recorded. A weightless exercise in shimmering tropical psychedelia, this is the flipside of Bel Air-style Can to me and I can find no fault with it.
Spray is surplus to requirements. Moonshake is superior mechanical funk - another great entry in the Can funk series like Spoon and Vitamin C from Ege Bamyasi.

In my opinion a good track for this album, rather than Bel Air, would have been Doko E which was recorded around the same time. You can hear the full length version on several bootlegs in great quality (some are called Doko E, one is called Future Days Live, a misnomer as it's a studio recording). A really good stripped-down extended minimal work-out that's recommended to Can completists.

The album after this - Soon Over Babaluma - isn't rated so highly by Can fans but I always really liked it. Parts of it are pretty deep.... going into some kind of quantum jazz fusion perhaps but mind-blowingly ahead of it's time, taking into what else was happening in the mid-70s.
Damo is missed of course, but I actually like the breathy vocals of Karoli. Dizzy Dizzy and Come Sta La Luna are two wonderful and engaging songs.

After that the Can catalogue gets pretty hit and miss. All the subsequent albums contain good moments and plenty of them - but Holger really needed to wield that razor-blade with a more ruthless effiency.

bel air takes me far away

this is the best can album