Amon Düül II
Wolf City

Who would have thought? Probably by now even the parents had resigned themselves and had given up their prodigal sons, placing the proverbial stone over it, yet Amon Düül II, far from having become bourgeois, seem at least to have almost settled down.

Indeed, after youth spent in the Black Forest, amidst psychedelic bacchanalian orgies, true anthems to anarchy and chaos, like the divine (haha, did you get it?!) Phallus Dei and, if possible, even more spectacular and monolithic Yeti, our heroes already began showing some first signs of "tiredness" by the third album.
But after all, a slight drop is physiological; wouldn't we all be tired after all those deliriums? And although the wildness (does that even exist as a term? who knows!) had slightly diminished, in the end, the inspiration and genuineness were still enough to easily overlook all that, willingly awarding another 5 stars to the third work of the commune, Tanz Der Lemminge; but it was from the fourth that it became evident, to pretty much everyone, that the shift hinted at in the previous album was the new path the band intended to follow.

Indeed, from there on, partly due to the group's growing "success," the most extreme deliriums and improvisations gradually took a back seat to make space for a more lucid and controlled madness that no longer sought at all costs to break the limits of song format and melody but to coexist with it. In short, our heroes emerged from the forest, decided to return to civilization, put their clothes back on, and perhaps even shave a bit, just enough to make themselves minimally presentable in society.
And although this surely prompted more than one die-hard fan from the early days to cry betrayal, not only musical but also ideological-political; we, enlightened carriers of relativist thought and children of the post-ideological 21st century, have learned that instead of being black and white, the world is painted in an infinite range of grays.
Precisely for this reason, although ready to admit that indeed the peaks of the initial duo will no longer be reached (but how many masterpieces do you expect a band to produce?!), we find without problems that even this second phase of the career offers something to delight us, and that the wolf (to stay on topic with the title of the work) may have lost some of its hair but certainly not its habit!

And so, the work I am presenting to you, starting with the wonderful cover, probably represents the most "mature" album of Düül, in which an ideal and fragile balance is formed between melodic lines and past psychedelic harshness; so much so that it has led some (also due to the presence of singer Renate Knaup) to describe it all as a dark version of Jefferson Airplane, a probably daring comparison, but one that might clarify a bit the musical coordinates that the listener about to hear this work can expect (but let's face it, from a purely melodic point of view the Jeffersons were surely superior and, above all, no!, Knaup does not sing like Slick).

That said, this work certainly deserves more than one listen and might indeed be an excellent way to get in touch with the kraut verbo for those who oppose the more challenging experiments typical of this genre; not a masterpiece but undoubtedly an excellent and wonderful album, apologies if it's not much!