Kraftwerk ‎– Autobahn

One of the best albums I have ever listened to. While there has been quite a lot of debating about which Kraftwerk album is the most influential, futuristic, and innovating one, I won't even try to get into all of that here. Happily enough, I recently rediscovered the simple beauty and floating musicality of "Autobahn", was totally blown away and thought I might share my experiences with potential readers.
The classic track title needs little to no introduction, with a sample of a car ignition, and then a vocoder voice repeats the word 'autobahn'; from there on we're on a 22 minute journey, loaded with awesome drum patterns and phenomenal segments played on keyboards, weird and electroish melodies and various far reaching sounds - to sum it all up: a fabulous voyage through the world of electronic music, which sounds incredibly amazing even today, one can only imagine what this must have sounded like to people who first heard it back in 1974...
The next four tracks, Kometenmelodie parts 1 and 2, Mitternacht and Morgenspaziergang are voiceless excursions through carefully crafted and carried out melody work and pure exploration of how far can electronic equipment go. Everything is mixed up here: piano, violin, guitar, synthesizers, and it all sounds so compact, so well put together. A special mention goes to the closing track, which has a gorgeous lead played on a flute, and it's a perfect outro to this otherwise perfect album. Maybe it's the lack of vocals, maybe it's the somewhat laid back feel of the music, but I just adore the way in which computer manipulation has been given an opportunity to collaborate with classical instruments, thus enabling the single tracks to fully express themselves, and touch more than any vocal in any language ever could.
When people speak about timeless music, I guess this is one of those albums they should be refering to. Too often does it happen today that I hear phrases like "a few years ago this was a hot and exquisite item, but it hasn't stoo up the test of time so well". Similar sounding reviews and opinions are too many to keep track of. But that shouldn't be a problem, especially if you're about to listen to "Autobahn", a fantastic trip down to the core roots of electronic music. Seriously though, if german highways were this pleasant to drive on, I would never want to get off them...