Today, I need something propulsive, strange, and angry, with a hint of shall we be old school and call it beauty? Yes, some beauty poking though. I'd like the music to either be without words or in words I don't know the meaning to because I don't want to get too hung up on "meaning," right now.
I just want to pour jet fuel inside my own little brain, now. This is where Amon Düül comes in, with skittering drums and their primitive mess all recorded in the red.
This is the kind of music where, when you read how one of the key original members froze to death in 1969 while tripping balls, you just think, "Well, of course he did." There are people out there who will tell you that Amon Düül II is better than the first version of the group, when they were nothing more than extremely stoned actual communal-living hippies with heavily distorted guitars who allegedly recorded so much music over the course of one long weekend that it found its way onto the majority of their releases, all of it just these excerpts from one long communal jam. What are you doing listening to those people? (Those people are only half-wrong; the later Düül is great but they're not quite as brutally, wrongly, amazing).
Also, if you lust for some variety within your diet of early Düül, you have it, with their lovely caveman folk record Paradieswärts Düül, which I believe is comprised of their earliest recordings before they figured out how to turn it up so loud. There's flute!
Metro Times music editor Mike McGonigal has written about music since 1984, when he started the fanzine Chemical Imbalance at age sixteen with money saved from mowing lawns in Florida. He's since written for Spin, Pitchfork, the Village VOICE and Artforum. He's been a museum guard, a financial reporter, a bicycle...