So I saw this live video of “Surrounded By The Stars” about a month or so back and I was inspired to pull this one out. My God, what an absolute monster. When I think of Amon Duul II, I absolutely do not think of the more straightforward, prog-rock-inclined band on display here. I think of a bunch of dudes who felt they were ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED to put a side-long freakout on each of the first three records they did (and in the case of “Yeti”, it ran well over a side). I think of the incredible power conveyed by their particular brand of screaming anarchy. While this record is adventurous in its own way, and there is certainly no shortage of screaming, “anarchy” doesn’t describe this record at all; it’s very structured, very song-oriented. Nothing even cracks the eight minute mark. So I can certainly see why someone whose primary interest in the band is “Yeti” would be disappointed by this record. But having said that, I’m someone whose primary interest in the band is “Yeti” and “Phallus Dei”, yet this is my favorite record of theirs. There’s a sometimes-unspoken assumption among most music nerds, particularly the ones who listen to so-called “Krautrock”, that the more commercial something is, the worse it is. For me this record is a serious challenge to that hypothesis. Making a record better than “Phallus Dei” is a formidable enough achievement in its own right. Capturing the raw, atavistic power of that record while condensing the songs to a much shorter length and still managing to bring more shades of meaning and musical/emotional depth to the table, well, that’s damn near unprecedented. (I realize the preceding sentence is painful rock-critic-ese, but this is a difficult album to speak about. Perhaps I should just say “IT’S FREAKING AWESOME” and leave it at that.) In particular there’s a definite “bad trip” vibe to the whole proceedings, as evidenced by the fact that I personally have had a bad trip while listening to it, which is a pretty significant feat when you don’t do drugs. It’s much darker than the typical music of the time, in a way I can’t readily define but which nonetheless becomes nearly palpable when it’s blasting through your speakers. No doubt everybody in the band was pretty familiar with bad trips through personal experience by this point in their career, which does a pretty good job of explaining the really upbeat, “everything’s going to be ok” vibe of the last two minutes of the record. I applaud their sense of social responsibility in this; most bands today are content to draw you into a relentless nightmare hellscape without taking the time to pull you back out. Maybe that’s why the world is so screwed up today. Probably not, but wouldn’t it be great if that was really the only problem we had, and all that needed to be done to fix it was for more people to make records like Wolf City?
I guess what I’m saying about this record is, IT’S FREAKING AWESOME. —David
