Amon Düül II- Mozambique REACTION & REVIEW 

What a shocker,Justin,whoever is recommending to you certainly knows their 70's prog rock .Try the 1972 album "wolf city" Amon duul ll..regards to the cat..

Probably my fave period of the band ('72-'73), with this album a close second to Carnival In Babylon as my top album, with Wolf City in third. All classics. I think you'd really dig "Shimmering Sand" from Carnival in Babylon. In fact ALL of Carnival would be cool!

I really love Amon Duul II and I'm thrilled to see you reacting to this song. This might be their most accessible record, with nearly every song brimming with hooks and pop sensibilities (my favorite being "Trap" which is a real bop). You can even hear aspects that anticipated the post punk movement years before the rest of the world caught up. I think this album would be a great candidate for a full album reaction.

Hi JP. First heard this album in the early 80's, introduced to me by a great friend who had all these old 'underground', (for want of a better term) albums. I played it a lot back then but haven't heard it for years. "Apocalyptic Bore" was always one favourite of mine. You should react to the whole album!

Love me some Amon Duul ll. First heard on them from an issue of Penthouse in 1974 in the music section. Along with Hawkwind. No...really...hey, don't you be judging me.

Hi there, so this is the infamous German Krautrock. Members of the hippie commune that Amon Düül were were pissed by the the poor musical skills most of those who 'played' the instruments had and came up with a new band Amon Düül II. They created a huge fan base amongst progressive young people in Germany and, as you might have guessed, the commune was history. Hi from Berlin, Germany

Extraordinary track and album!!!!

Those intro vocals really sound like a daxophone to me.

Kudo's to the person who recommended this! I never listened to enough to form an opinion,(chalk it up to heavy use of cannabinoids, and psychedelics, and to much interest in the opposite sex!). This is great. They are speaking out against the sins of my heritage, the Portuguese. Mozambique, Angola, in particular did not receive independence till 1975, and resulted in decades of civil war and power grabs. What I've heard before today was sporadic and in the background, this deserves a deeper dive!!! Peace & Love.

I like this song and one or two others on this LP but I've got to go with the recommendations for Wolf City - in my view their most complete well formed work. I also love their previous rambling exploratory music but after this record things went a bit awry - more commercially mainstream (can't really blame them we've all got to live). As for your comparison to Canterbury bands - I can't see it really but interesting idea as my obsession with the Canterbury scene followed soon after being similarly hooked on so called 'krautrock'

What an interesting choice! I think you did Archangel Thunderbird, but that must've been a couple of years ago now. I can't fault these guys really, they were always interesting and the definition of experimental.

The final repetitive section, with the spacey sound effects, reminded me strongly of Hawkwind, like something off their Space Ritual album.

This is a great album and so is Phallus Dei , Yeti, Wolf City and Dance of the Lemmings which are their best albums.... some of the 80's albums are good too....

I enjoyed this. Great for both easy listening and more intense listening if that makes sense.

Mozambique by Bob Dylan is good, too. In fact, the whole Desire album is fantastic.

Vive le Trance is like a Five out of ten album . One side is pretty good . Phallus dea , Wolf City , Tans Der Lemming , Lemming Mania and Yeti are probably their best albums and there's some decent live stuff .

My fav track is fly United

Cross between ENO, Van der Graaf Generator and Hawkwind? Cool track.

Nice - not a track of theirs I know. Try "Sleepwalker's Timeless Bridge" or "Wie der Wind am Ende eine Strasse" (both from "Wolf City"). Have you listened to any Faust yet?

A group that I heard out of politeness toward a friend at the time of its release. A band that gives the impression that it's an improvisational commune in which musical purity is not a pre-requisite, but which happily takes up whatever appeals to it members in any given week, whether that be a musical genre or some previously untried technology, modern or ancient. Sometimes hits the target, sometimes not, but great musicianship. Lyrics? Never felt the urge to pick up on them as the choral contribution was seldom appealing to me. To me they seem to meander more, musically speaking, than Caravan; for me, the latter band works with a more compositional structure.

Great band. Experimental psychedelic with great musicianship. I like the whole acid ceremony feel.

As far as the lyrics go, it's the reduction of the conflict in Mozambique to a simple good-freedom-fighters against bad-oppressors morality tale (with some anger on offer for anyone getting bored with tales of lust). (There was once a real conflict there, and there were at least some real, genuine, honest-to-goodness-heroic freedom fighters fighting in it, but time has shown that it was all a bit more complicated than the story time version that used to sell so well at news hour. A lot of someone-else's-problem stuff of a less entertaining kind.) With that said, if you want details (beyond what the members of the band would've been familiar with, is my guess - their familiarity being greatest with the emotions one can feel about things like this -- and that's not quite as sarcastic as it might sound, because real morality isn't cool headed, and is often angry. Well I say so. You're free to disagree.) Er details. Almost exactly in 1500, the Portuguese found a way of bypassing the middle men of the Mediterranean by going round the Cape. By 1505 they had a cathedral (not much of a cathedral right away, obviously, since it takes about 100 years to build one of those) in Tete on the Zambezi. In what's now Mozambique - more in the north than the south, they took over from the Swahili Muslims and Arabs, and took over their enterprises when they did. (And they also brought Portuguese late feudalism into places like the lower Zambezi valley, where huge tracts of land were placed under some designated local lord - they created an aristocracy for the place.) Then yadda yadda yadda, a whole lot of history happens, until we eventually get to the 1970's, and the time of Amol Duul. By then, most of what's now Mozambique had been, fully, a Portuguese colony for a few hundred years (much of it for a lot longer than there's been a USA or 13 Colonies, etc.) Was it a lovely place? No, of course not. Was it the Portuguese version of apartheid? Here, you have to start stretching all sorts of definitions for starters. (There's more stretching needed by I don't have nice, terse words for it). For starters, the idea that the Portuguese colonies were places of "white-minority-rule" would not have gone down well with the so-called philosphers who came up with that concept and gave it its name, because they would've classified most of the landowners in the Portuguese colonies as "Coloured" (with a capital C, because in South Africa it's a culturally distinct group of people, to this very day), and not "White" (which I suppose they'd have put in capitals too - like the band seems to be doing in a converse kind of way, so I'd better put it that way too, just for current purposes). If the Portuguese became racist somewhere in the hundreds of years they were in Mozambique - and I mean in the ultra-toxic way that expecially white people became at least by Victorian times, rather than just in the way that all people everywhere seem to be good at being buttholes if they can, and finding themselves others to invent ways of looking down upon or pushing out into the margins of the world - it would've been some time in the fascist phase of the 20th Century. Go back further in time, and the Portuguese settlers married local women and became something like "Catholic Africans". (Slave trading Catholic Africans, since that's one of the enterprises they took over from the Swahilis and the Arabs -- but that's enough of the complications I'm trying not to completely gloss over in the available time - which may well have run out already?) Actually there's a fairly good indicator of the difference in Portuguese attitudes as far as racism goes to those of, e.g. the English, French, and Dutch - at least in earlier times: They had a treaty with the Bakongo tribe of the lower Congo river area, whose king converted to Christianity in the first contact, just about (and learned perfectly fluent Portuguese really quickly - as well as whatever knowledge he could gain of the European world of the late 1400's - which he did largely by learning very quickly how to read and write, as well). As far as Portuguese attitudes go, they recognized the Bakongo aristocracy as lords and ladies, knights and ladies, and kings and queens, according to their equivalent medieaval stations. There was no distinction drawn between their elites and Portuguese elites - at least in those days. (I don't know the history in fine detail, mind.) In Southern African terms, I'd say the Portuguese were thought of as "not racist" back in the day, and it was a reasonably fluid society, and definitely not something that ended up with a cramp up its arse like South Africa did at least in "early apartheid" days. So the lyrics are story telling, rather than spot on about some specific facts. A morality tale. A good tale, even, taken with a bit of common sense when this becomes necessary. Something to get angry about. Some anger to get righteous about. Something to power up action instead of just words, around these things. (So fair enough as far as that goes.) But the idea of bringing rape into the story is to help stir up the anger (in some ways not dissimilarly to how the picture the bad boy takes to the toilet is meant to stir up other strong feelings - as long as you don't push the comparison too far). I don't think the Portuguese colonists were more rape-prone, murder-prone, or even race-hate-prone than other peoples of the Earth. They just were in the world they were born in, with a "normality" created by that world as it was at birth and onward, doing what we all do, and mostly unthinkingly accepting today's "normal" as normal - as the way things are meant to be, even. (Because that's the hopeless bit of being hopelessly human, mainly.) If I didn't know some ex-Mozambican Portuguese people or a bit of how things roll there in fact, rather than in stories with other reasons, I wouldn't have to spout on with all this TL; DR, but it crossed over my border posts without a passport for a little way, so now all my headspace-ants are running out to bite it. Because I'm hopelessly human, try as I may to be otherwise, I suppose. At the time of conflicts like the guerilla war in Mozambique (which, in principle, if not in practice - taking a longer-term view with 20:20 hindsight, had a "good side and a bad side") the legendary mode of relating events from there might have been OK. (All part of war. And all's fair in love and war, after all.) However, With all of it quite a way back in the past already, and a present day that matters more. (In which the actual, gritty, messy facts matter more than the stories did then.) Now I'm actually drifting a bit south, since I don't know much about how "Moz" is being run right now. Friends I have up there who left for a new life seem to think it's going great, even. So then since this was meant to be just related to the lyrics I should just shut up now.

yes, it's a song about colonialism

Yeah, somewhere this track can make think of a mixture of Magma and the Canterbury scene and it is certainly more bearable than the early rantings of Amon Düül II but it's not really exciting, without necessarily being unpleasant (I'm a little mixed on that). The piano intro is brief but each part to follow doesn't really have any coherence in terms of stylistic logic and the last part drags on too long for my taste. Ah! and finally the voice of Renate Knaup is frankly not attractive.

Please listen to speaking in tongues by talking heads

To me it’s all about perspective and early influences. On a first listen, all I hear at the end is the same four chords repeated over and over with a bunch of stuff going on. It goes on too long. If Tom Waite was performing this in his style, I’d give it a ⭐️, if it was XTC ⭐️⭐️, this band I’ll give ⭐️⭐️⭐️ because I can relate to the sound and style, if it was Deftones ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. It’s hard to give an unbiased opinion! Probably ⭐️⭐️.5

This is a band that never appealed to me, I'd rather listen to Hawkwind or Flower Kings, King Crimson, etc. I found the intro too long before the change.

Overlong intro, then rant, then even longer outro. I didn't hear anything particularly psych, experimental or proggy here. Unless your talking about the length of the track. What i heard was what could've (maybe) been a decent three and a half min track dragged out to nearly 8 mins.....

Mozambique by Bob Dylan is good, too. In fact, the whole Desire album is fantastic.