Kraftwerk 2009 reissues

It's hard not to turn a review into a history lesson when faced with reissues of this number and calibre, but that's hardly a bad thing: Kraftwerk are a band worth being evangelical about, and while everyone has an idea of what they sound like – they were all, like, synthesisers and stuff, right? – it's only when one's faced with this sort of sheer weight of material that one can pull together a proper picture.

The collection begins in 1974 with the fourth Kraftwerk album, which may seem like cheating but it's where the creature called "Kraftwerk" began to resemble the thing we know today. The quartet did this via the album's 22-minutes-plus title track, essentially a tone poem to Germany's highway system. 'Autobahn' still sounds astonishing, not least because you can hear the seeds of everything from "Heroes"-era Bowie to PiL to Aphex Twin to Boards of Canada within it – and, just in case you thought they had no sense of humour, the fact that the songs' lyrics are a knowing, tongue-in-cheek nod to US car hymns like 'Little Deuce Coupe': the recurring "Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn" (approximately "we're drivin' drivin' drivin' on the Autobahn") is a deliberate pun on the chorus to the Beach Boys' 'Fun Fun Fun'. And in terms of influence, the score to every Dario Argento horror film clearly takes its starting point from 'Mitternacht' (yeah, Goblin, we're on to you), though 'Morgenspaziergang' manages to be even creepier with recorder and piano overlaying digital birdsong and water effects, creating an aural uncanny valley.

Such acoustic elements would be done away with altogether by the time of 1975's Radio-Activity: from here on in, only the occasional human voice would interrupt the all-electronic arrangement. The title track was a huge hit in France (proof of the enduring commercial power of Marie Curie, one assumes) and set the agenda for much of what was to home: detached melodies over clipped electronic percussion and Ralf Hütter's airy, unemotional vocals; and again, the band's oft-overlooked sense of humour is on show with the cutesy closing track 'Ohm Sweet Ohm'.

1977's Trans-Europe Express continues the notions of travel and perception over an entire album and isn't quite as powerful as its predecessor: where 'Autobahn' was hypnotic, the nine-minute 'Europe Endless' drags. However, single 'Showroom Dummies' is rightly a classic Kraftwerk track and the album's clipped drum machines were enormously influential on the electronic musicians to come, especially on the inventive title track.

The Man-Machine is the one that's got the songs you know on it: the gorgeous, stately 'Neon Lights', the strident title track, the self-mocking 'The Robots' and the band's quote-unquote  hit 'The Model'. It's also the most economical of the albums with a mere six tracks, yet feels anything but lightweight.

1981's Computer World was the last great Kraftwerk album, from the forward-looking title track (hey, how many other bands were concerned about freedom of digital information issues in 1981?) to the quirky single 'Pocket Calculator'. This is also the album that most obviously influenced the synthpop movement: tracks like 'It's Better To Compute' could have almost as easily come from OMD or Depeche Mode (or, for that matter, early Ladytron).

It was the last Kraftwerk album for a good long while too: aside from 1983's one-off ‘Tour de France' single the band were silent until 1986's Electric Café, reissued here under its working title of Techno Pop and with a rejigged running order. It's still notably less fasinating than the previous albums – possibly due to over-reliance of familiar keyboard sounds rather than the sort of groundbreaking aural adventures that the band were known for: even the proto-industrial percussion of tracks like 'Boing Boom Tschak' had been done earlier (and better) by others: 'Techno Pop owes much, consciously or otherwise, to ‘People Are People', while the keys and percussion sounds of 'Sex Object' were used to better effect by New Order on 'Shellshocked' and OMD on 'Tesla Girls'. For the first time Kraftwerk sound like followers rather than leaders and it's no surprise that the band more or less ceased to exist after its release, with founders Hütter and Florian Schneider the only consistent members by the 90s.

From then on we have two discs that exist better when considered as oddities than albums: the 1991 quasi best-of The Mix, with newly recorded versions of many of the hits sequenced together (and given new acid house percussion tracks which dates the album strongly) and 2003's Tour de France Soundtracks, which took the aforementioned single as a starting point for a number of sleek, atmospheric pieces that quite possibly sound wonderful on a bike but is no substitute for tunes.

Sonically, the albums have never sounded better: Hütter has painstakingly polished every texture so that the high-end glistens and the bottom rumbles beautifully.  While Hütter and the latest incarnation of the band are reportedly close to completing the first new Kraftwerk album in decades (Schneider having quietly left the band earlier this year), this collection does a more than comprehensive job of explaining just how extraordinary these Düsseldorf oddballs really were.

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