UK cover (taken from Discogs)
I hadn’t planned to feature this album tonight, but I dipped in to have a quick listen and was hooked 🙂
Amon Düül ii were an offshoot of the Amon Düül commune in Munich that focused, in a very German way, on radical art and politics. This album was released in Germany in 1969 and, according to Discogs, in 1969 also in the UK. It doesn’t appear to have been advertised, though, until the March 7 1970 edition of Melody Maker, which ran a review in the 14 March edition, so I think I’m justified in putting it here.
Melody Maker review
One of the things that attracts me to the album, after several weeks of UK and US music, is that Amon Düül ii were outsiders from what it is easy to see, parochially, as the ‘mainstream’. Although this is largely a rock album, its influences are broader than your typical Brit or American band. This kept me listening even in the passages that sound dated.
I’m not sure how much of this was rehearsed and how much was improvised; the general tightness of the playing suggests it was well-rehearsed. There is, as Richard Williams notes, weirdness (though I have no idea where he gets ‘satanic’ from), but it’s a very musical weirdness, and though it is sometimes a very heavy sound, it isn’t the stereotypical riffing of a hard rock band. It reminds me much more of early Gong.
This album was an unexpected surprise. I have one of their other albums on a cassette somewhere, but I haven’t listened to it since the late eighties or early nineties. I need to dig it out and explore the band further. Phallus Dei may be another on my list of 1970 albums to buy in due course.
An expanded edition is on Spotify, and a different expanded edition on YouTube:
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