The Monks
Black Monk Time

THE REVIEW

If, upon opening the booklet, you find the psychiatric gazes, black robes, and monastic tonsures of these five former American marines living in Germany both morbid and somehow seductive, then there's already something wrong with you, and perhaps their disturbed and pitch-black version of garage sound is just what you need.
If you have a strong stomach, start enjoying the electric banjo's abrasions, the organ and fuzzed guitars' acidity, and the relentless, seismic drum-bass engine as the binding force... as if that wasn't enough, there's a voice that at times sounds like a Captain Beefheart high on helium, and at other times like Frank Zappa dubbing an evil/demented cartoon.

Post-traumatic shock syndrome and subsequent rejection of the American Way Of Life?
Surely military life bears some responsibility for the alienation exuding from these more-than-nihilistic illustrations of sub-human life...
But in that case, we should thank Uncle Sam if, after all, the rock'n'roll result of decades of the Cold War is this impossible soundtrack for parties at the Addams family house.

The explanation could be found if, in 1966, a time machine had existed through which the five psychopaths could have seen a Cramps concert in 1980 and a Devo one in 1977, not before peeking into the basements where the Velvet Underground were spewing Sister Ray...
I know I shouldn't fall into the worst vice of the CritiCazzi, but the temptation to unleash a torrent of prefixes like "proto-punk-psych-hardcore" is quite strong for a group that, in times of emerging flower power, beats everyone to the punch with a sound that, even before being "forward," is simply "shifted." And moreover in Germany, which is geographically distant from the Anglo-American lysergic ferment, and temporally also from certain future cosmic journeys...

It's beat time,
it's hop time,
it's monk time now!