Amon Düül
Psychedelic Underground

Living in someone's shadow is tough, and the members of Amon Düül know this all too well, as they are overshadowed not by one but two imposing figures. First, there are their cousins, the more famous Amon Düül II, who wrote some of the best pages of krautrock; moreover, among the few who know the first version of the group, most do so mainly because of the involvement of Uschi Obermaier, a percussionist as well as a model (for fairness, here is a male counterpart so that representatives of the fair sex can also feast their eyes).

But let's start from the beginning. The '60s are ending, and Germany, defeated in the war and now divided, at the center of the clash between the West and the Soviets, is still in search of its own identity, also from a cultural point of view.
This period of void and uncertainty is characterized by strong protests in the country, and it is precisely from the student movements that many underground groups emerge, often with a strong left-wing ideological basis that, besides aspiring to a new (and hopefully better) society, also seek to give a new face to German music, using American psychedelia as a starting point (to which the first experiments with electronics, then still in its infancy, were added) but reinterpreting it in a purely Teutonic key, giving birth to what would become one of the most interesting, creative, and original genres of modern music: krautrock.

Thus, in 1967, in Munich, Amon Düül was born, an artistic commune dedicated to an extremely free-form psychedelia, almost anti-musical in its noisiness, deliberately amateurish and purely based on improvisation. The commune strictly followed the dogma of creative freedom, giving no importance to the musical abilities of its members, and while this absolute freedom is the main strength of the album, it is also its biggest flaw: the tracks, in being proudly and undeniably freaky, eventually stretch too thin, as a sense of confusion prevails and the album seems to drift aimlessly; there is, essentially, a lack of even a minimal guiding thread to give direction and structure to the pieces, which often lose themselves in a great pounding of drums and the like. There were also dissenting voices within the commune, pushing towards even minimal mastery of instruments and adherence to more "formal" musical structures, leading to the split into I and II.

If this album and the group surely deserve praise for their courage and absolute fidelity to their line, as well as being historically fundamental as precursors of all kraut to come, one cannot deny that the work itself arouses more interest for its historical value than its artistic one. Not that listening to it is unpleasant, but in comparison not only with the more mature cousins but also with other historical groups of the genre, ours can only come out, at least somewhat, poorly.