Once you’ve manfully taken on board the tiresome confluence of band name and album title here, there is in fact much to commend about this furiously busy set piece of German 70s prog. Despite being formed in Berlin in the revolutionary ferment of 1968 – and despite, in this instance, the presence behind the mixing desk of krautrock kingpin Conny Plank – Birth Control have little or nothing in common with otherworldly, envelope-pushing peers such as Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk and Faust. If anything, the band’s rocky schtick is closer to the Nektar end of the spectrum, albeit replacing the latter’s trippy stock-in-trade with a gimlet-eyed, mathematical, fusion-forged proficiency.
1976’s Backdoor Possibilities is the band’s sixth album, a diffusely conceptual undertaking bristling with complex instrumental subdivisions and parentheses. It’s not an especially attractive sound, mind: exceptionally musical but hardly melodious, with keyboardist Zeus B Held’s arcing ARP synths and Moogs the very embodiment of a cold, future-shock dystopia. It is, however, broadly representative of Birth Control’s take-no-prisoners ethos if considered in tandem with the bonus live tracks, including a maniacal Long Tall Sally, which demonstrate just what gurning, crowd-coaxing monsters they were – and indeed still are – when taking to the stage.
