Amon Düül

AMG Review of Amon Düül

Stewart Mason
All Music Guide

The belated U.S. release of Amon Düül's first album (originally released in Germany the year before under the title Psychedelic Underground and since reissued in various countries under different names) is something of a botch in comparison to the original. The album contains the same material as the original German release, but, for some obscure reason, the running order has been entirely shifted, putting the magnificent opener "An Extremely Lovely Girl Dreams of Sandosa," a 17-minute percussion-led jam that features some surprisingly potent guitar riffs and a call and response vocal section that (probably unintentionally) strongly recalls Sun Ra's '60s work, at the start of side two, where its musical and thematic impact is blunted. The other five songs are similarly jumbled, robbing the album of the conceptual purity of the original. The one change that makes sense is moving "Mama Duul and Her Sauerkraut Band Begin to Play Up," a three-minute endurance test of rattling percussion that's not even trying to keep time in one channel and a prodigious amount of tape hiss in the other. Amazingly, this album came out on Prophesy Records, a subsidiary of the ubblegum label Bell Records, home of the Partridge Family.