DISASTER / LÜÜD NOMA

I bought this (the Rocktopus reissue version with the "bird people" cover) before I really knew much of the history of Amon Düül. I just saw the Amon Düül name and was delighted that it was a double album, hoping that I'd found the Holy Grail, two discs more of DANCE OF THE LEMMINGS-style avant/space ecstasy.

Well, you can forget about all that. Peter Leopold's involvement notwithstanding, Amon Düül and Amon Düül II are NOT the same band. You see, in the late 60's, the Amon Düül commune split into two, with the more musicianly faction carrying the "II" moniker. The other faction, who got to record an album first, had a more "anyone can play music!" attitude. As a result, the music was crap.

I take back every bad thing I ever said about Disc Two of YETI. What we're presented with here is a few amateur-level stoned hippies jamming with their girlfriends banging on a bunch of percussion instruments. For hours on end. With some of the most pi$$-poor sound quality imaginable. When a band on the level of Can jams for hours and edits the pieces down to just the best stuff, the results can be magical. Here it's just a big, formless blob of tuneless, jangling guitar and thudding percussion.

Glib, arty types like to describe this as "brilliant primitivism", when they really mean, "I can tolerate more annoying music than you. In a word: unlistenable. Avoid.

This is a difficult album to assess : on one hand, it could be considered as a total 'disaster', or, on the other hand, considered as a long lost link of formative krautrock and deserves every bit of attention one can muster. If overlong, percussive rambles are your thing, along with a poor sound, minimal guitars, bass and keyboard prescence, then this might be an enjoyable experience. It's not that I don't enjoy this myself, I usually listen to one record at a time (my LP has the 'bird people' cover) but at times, the whole crew have really shabby timing, almost random, no doubt under the influence of various substances. The brief take of 'Yea Yea Yea' is a total crack-up - the guy singing is struggling to find his voice, and doesn't quite know the lyrics, it makes me laugh every time :)

The only relation to the more musical faction, Amon Duul II, is that the drummer, Peter Leopold, was present. By the time of that band's 'Almost Alive (and looking fine)' release of 1977, Leopold actually evolved into a great drummer - however, that was another band, another time , another place, etc. 'Disaster' is a very free-form, repetitve, and primitive offering, not really inspired, but I haven't heard another band play with this much 'awkward conviction'. 2 stars.

Paradieswärts Düül aside, all of AD's albums have come from poorly-recorded and raw jam sessions that have been the trademark of both AD groups but also a sort of influence on a lot of Kraut groups, including a. o. Can. While Disaster is not as disastrous sound-wise as Psych Under, it still has a full aptitude at resembling its predecessor. With a disastrous artwork, but a better production, you'd believe that this could've been the finished product of PU.

I'm not really up to make a full review out of this partial album, where cuts are made abruptly and other bizarre crude arbitrary decisions are made, so please look up my Psych Under review and transpose the text here: it'll fit at roughly 93.5647%.

Easy to see why other reviews give this one poor ratings >> it lacks the historical importance of PU and brings absolutely nothing more to that album.

There is at least one great thing about this (double) album : its title. Great inspiration for sure!

Having said this, I guess that there little to be added. This band continues to "offer" the same noisy, fully jam-oriented stuff (can't call this music really). The sound is awful (not even of decent boot quality), the "tracks" are totally uninspired, lousy and quite dispensable.

I was a bit less harsh with their "Paradieswarts Duul" (two stars), but even this one was no big deal. But this one is probably the "climax" of all their albums so far. And it is a double one! Can you imagine the pain to endure? For about seventy minutes of this treat is quite a hard exercise.

Is there a track worth mentioning? Huuumm: I don't think so. Maybe under influence, but even so I am not sure that something would stand out from this "Disaster".

After a super dull "Broken", I can cope for a while with "Somnium" (but not for too long to be honest). It is probably the most digestible track of all featured here. If you would like to torture yourself, you can listen to this double album but you have been warned.

One star of course.

I'm tempted to award this notorious (and notoriously well-titled) document five contrary stars, but I'm afraid such an act of dissent would only make me seem even more of a crackpot than I really am.

The prevailing opinion of the album, on this site and elsewhere, regards it as the equivalent of a kindergarten drum class, dragged out to an excruciating 68-minutes of unskilled clattering and bashing. A single, strummed electric guitar (and a little stoned scat singing, buried in the uproar) is the only link to anything resembling genuine music; otherwise it's a radical '60s version of The Gong Show, with a blacksmith's anvil (and a ton of bongos) instead of an actual gong. Even idle daydreams of a topless Uschi Obermeier smacking her tom-toms aren't enough to save it.

And yet, after sixty-plus minutes of uninterrupted exposure, the whole thing can begin making a warped sort of sense. A full hour of amateur Krautrock drumming by obvious non-musicians will sometimes have that effect: wearing down your aesthetic defenses and eroding your critical inhibitions.

This was the band's third album, all of them supposedly culled from a single, monster jam session, three years earlier. By this point you might expect it to represent the bottom scrapings of a very shallow barrel, and it's true that the energy level can't compare to the apocalyptic chaos of "Psychedelic Underground", the initial gleaning from 1968.

But the less hectic pacing actually improves the music (and here I'm using the word 'music' only in its most generic sense). None of the tracks has a real beginning or end; the edits merely interrupt a casual performance in progress. But the total effect is something (slightly) more than the sum of its haphazard parts, showing evidence of nominal post-production structure in places. There's even a surprising nod to The Beatles, in the song "Yea Yea Yea (Zerbeatelt)": a sixty-second cover of "I Should Have Known Better", from "A Hard Day's Night".

Albums like "Disaster" function like an audio litmus test, useful in determining a) the listener's forbearance in the face of extremity, and b) his or her attitude toward the ephemeral boundary separating music from noise. Even the album's mirrored subtitle (Lüüd Noma) seems appropriate, describing a communal music experience almost backward in its non-musical naïveté.

An hour of the stuff is certainly a lot to sit through. But I'm sure there's a few misfits reading this who might learn to appreciate it, if only for the brazen arrhythmic middle finger raised defiantly against The Establishment.