AMON DüüL II - Yeti

Only a generation after it was at war with nearly everyone, Germany was evidently at war with itself. The nation, divided by political ideology, was culturally and physically separated: one half apparently in colour, with all the trappings of modern life; the other almost in shades of grey, one eye cautiously looking over the wall at how the Other Half lived, the other eye frantically looking around for Stasi informants.

For the capitalist Westerners, life was grand. The middle classes were doing just fine and apparently extremely comfortable with the situation as it was… apart from a spirited proportion of the youth. Outraged that the older generations weren’t suitably ashamed of the atrocities they had taken part in - or at best, placidly gone along with – and railing against the traditional middle class system, they mobilised into movements, communes, to shake the Olds out of their cossetted armchairs and shock them into actually thinking.

Amon Düül II rose out of the ashes of the original Amon Düül commune (with band members who could actually play their instruments this time), whose mission was to play music which was diametrically opposed to the bland, saccharine, mindless Schlager pap that was infesting the nation at the time, a cultural manifestation of the unthinking sleepwalk their elders were stumbling through.

By 1970 it arguably reached its zenith with the astounding Yeti. Nothing about this album is comforting: the cover is an ominous, shady character with a scythe - presumably eyeing up Heino, or some other egregious middle-of-the-roader - and the music is gloriously brutal, unsettling, cacophonous and dissonant. This is not an LP to have on while you do the dishes, it’s one to start raging fires to.

The opener Soap Shop Rock is a kind of expressionist mini-opera, played out in a fever dream of interweaving vocals and stabbed guitar lines… it’s phenomenal, even if I have zero idea what it’s going on about, and lines like ‘SMOKE… COMING OUT OF THEIR EYES’ have etched themselves into dark recesses of my brain, to resurface when I wake, blinking and confused at 3am.

It’s an LP full of collisions: She Came Through the Chimney starts out as a calm, lilting guitar arpeggio, until jarring strings collide to make it feel like a bad acid trip. Archangels Thunderbird is almost mainstream with its crunching guitar riff, and at the same time unconventional due to the 6/4 rhythm and Renata Knaup’s unhinged vocals which barely manage to stay in tune. The Return of Rübezahl sounds like an eastern-tinged heavy prog version of Spirit’s Fresh Garbage, but it only lasts for a couple of minutes. Eye Shaking King sounds like the name suggests: it’s a slow, twisted, assault on the senses which occasionally adheres to harmonic and rhythmic structures, but possibly only by accident.

It’s a remarkable LP, about as far away from comfort, contentment and consonancy as it is possible to get; as a reaction to the societal norms of the time, it’s as stark and as jarring as they come.