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“Phallus Dei” or the Dick of God. This album is an endless acid trip that seems played by Jefferson Airplane on a bad LSD trip. The Amon Düül II had the intuition to merge American psychedelia with Stockhausen, and the result is epic, dark, pagan, and completely insane yet, at the same time, original and musical, unlike the senseless sessions of their little brothers, Amon Düül. In fact, Amon Düül, with "Psychedelic Underground" and other similar subsequent albums (except "Paradieswärts Düül") like "Collapsing Singvögel Rückwärts & C", "Disaster (Lüüd Noma)", and "Experiment", seemed like hippies gone bad. Unfortunately, there has always been someone within record companies who wanted to profit and this is now documented history. It was material deemed unusable that was published only thanks to the success of “Phallus Dei”.
The beginning of “Phallus Dei” is entrusted to the Middle Eastern and occult sounds of "Kanaan". In "Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren," Renate Knaup's voice emerges from immeasurable depths of pure madness. The macabre dance of "Luzifers Ghilom" takes us instead to visit a remote monastery in Tibet populated by monks devoted to forgotten cults. "Henriette Krotenschwanz" is a crazy and iconoclastic para-operatic march. Finally, there is the expansive and acidic suite of "Phallus Dei": it sounds like an invocation to Cthulhu and the mad deities created by H.P. Lovecraft. Music that should be listened to under the influence of psychotropic substances. Improvisation reigns supreme but, in reality, the Amon Düül II knew well how to keep their creativity under control. It feels like a pagan mass officiated in the middle of the Black Forest, where percussion, effected guitars, and keyboards create a sound beyond time and space. At the end of this "Journey to the End of the Night," one feels stunned and exhilarated as if they had drunk the nectar of the Gods.
At the time, there was something different in the air, a feeling that Amon Düül II fully captured. “Phallus Dei” is a timeless classic that continues to resonate, as Julian Cope would say, in the minds of all the Enlightened.
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