65. The Monks - Black Monk Time (March 1966)

1. Monk Time*

2. Shut Up*

3. Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice

4. Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy

5. I Hate You

6. Oh, How to Do Now

7. Complication*

8. We Do Wie Du

9. Drunken Maria

10. Love Came Tumblin' Down

11. Blast Off!

12. That's My Girl

A

I remember the first time I heard the Monks. My friend at the time played "Monk Time" for me. The first words out of my mouth were "Is he even playing chords?". And truly, "Monk Time" remains one of the strangest songs ever recorded, a thunderous beast that disintegrates into atonal organ solos and the singer screaming "Stop it! I don't like it!" in between stream of consciousness rants about James Bond and the Vietnam war. And yet for all its teetering on the edge of making sense, it has a rock solid beat and you could probably even dance to it. That's really the album in a nutshell - raucous, unhinged music anchored to primitive, insistent grooves. No wonder this has been called the first punk album, and a progenitor of krautrock. Probably both statements are misleading, though. The Monks never made much of a splash, and it wasn't till well after punk kicked off that people stumbled across their music and started letting it influence them. That said, they've obviously been pretty influential - "I Hate You", for example, could easily be an early song by the Fall.

Anyway, this is a great album. The lyrics aren't especially deep, but that's kind of the point. These were a bunch of U.S. servicemen stationed in West Germany who clearly didn't believe in the modern world, and thought it was kind of insane. In the best punk tradition, they responded with deranged lyrics about the insanity of the modern world, the impulses we constantly have to quell to get through life, and a general attitude of "The world is crazy and it's driving me insane". Musically, it rejects a lot of the conventions of the time, and although it can occasionally sound tame by modern standards it must have been utterly baffling at the time. The main strength, musically, is that even though they were making heavy, distorted, unhinged music, the Monks understood how to craft a catchy, danceable song. The result is highly experimental music with confrontational lyrics which remains surprisingly listenable. It's out there, but the Monks clearly had an appreciation for garage rock and R&B that anchors their songs. 

So, yeah. This is a must listen for anyone interested in experimental rock. The great thing about it is that the Monks had a "try anything" attitude that means you can never be sure what the next song will sound like, or even which direction a given song will make. For every outre venture there's a simple rock number like "We Do Wie Du", or the polka-meets-psych funk of "Drunken Maria".

Really, there's no way to do this album justice in words. It's about twenty years ahead of its time.