Search - Amon Duul II :: Yeti

Essential psychedelic prog rock

Chris 'raging bill' Burton | either Kent or Manchester, United Kingdom | 11/28/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I didn't really know what I was letting myself in for. I'll be honest, I downloaded this album (initially), it wasn't a blind purchase. But if it had been, it would have been quite possibly the best blind purchase I ever made. Having never heard of krautrock prior to hearing this, I was introduced to the genre via this album. And what a way to be introduced to a genre of music! Yeti remains my favourite krautrock album. It's the perfect blend of psychedelic improvisation, driving riffs, moments of catchy pop and all out experimental weirdness.



It feels strange to call this album rock, because it feels like so much more than you'd expect from a rock band. Nonetheless, aside from the occasional violin, the instrumentation here comprises rock instruments first and foremost. Catchy riffs and drum beats maintain a sense of accessibilty which a ton of guitar and violin soloing drives forward the improvisational nature of the music. But most important is the overall ambiance and feel of the music. I'm not going to try to describe the feel of the music, you just have to hear it. The songs themselves are a mixture of shorter composed pieces and longer jams. The title track itself weighs in at 18 minutes and sounds almost wholly improvised.



If you're looking to get into Amon Duul II or krautrock in general, or just want to hear an incredible, psychedelic rock album then you need Yeti. It's a great piece of work that never fails to captivate me. I've heard other Amon Duul II albums besides Yeti and other krautrock bands besides Amon Duul II and they've all been great, but Yeti remains my favourite."

Great Halluzinations

Kayu Lam | New York, NY | 11/08/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As a music-making mode, "psychedelic" music is something of a highwire act. The music's perilous disdain for rigour and structure lends it a haphazard predilection for earnestly vacuous displays of directionless squawks and jangles.



Yet emerging from the radicalist commune movement of 1960s Munich, Amon Düül II injected their anarchic leanings with a force that drove the green fuse through the flower (power) of the "jam band" archetype. After the fitful brilliance of their debut Phallus Dei, Amon Düül II's efforts came to fruition with this epic 1970 masterpiece.



The fecund ground laid by Amon Düül II with Yeti continue to be plowed by admirable acts like Animal Collective and their wonderfully addled ilk, but this superlative opus remains one of the essential records of this, or any other, genre."

Amon Duul II's GREATEST SHINING MOMENT

W. T. Hoffman | Pennsylvania, United States | 09/04/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is the record that Julian Cope gushed was the best album to come out of the KRAUTROCK movement. I personally cant concur, but its certainly one of the greatest albums from that 1969-1977 classic KRAUTROCK period. YETI is Amon Duul II's second album, and seems to be the point where the band was most closely united inside a musical psychedelic transcendence. After YETI, personal changes started to affect the band, making them sound sold out and stale, after VIVA LA TRANCE. But they really had something wild going on for their YETI double album. (The CD runs about 73 minutes long, including two songs that AMAZON dont list--RATTLESNAKEPLUMCAKE and BETWEEN THE EYES...the A and B side of a single that was released about this time.) This bands truly unique sound stems from their song structures, which meander around, returning to recognizable leitmotifs periodically, especially on their LONG composistions, like "Soap Shop Rock". Everything about this music SCREAMS Psychedelia, right down to the titles of some of the songs. "SANDOZ IN THE RAIN" (an improv song stuck at the end of the album) refers to the Swiss pharmeceutical company that first produced LSD. But its the wild chaos of the instruments, the drums, the crazy lyrics (in english of course), and the male and female singers, that really make this music take off. Some people compare their sound to Jefferson Airplane or even Velvet Underground, but the analogy only extends to the bands all using both a male and female singer. AMON DUUL's sound is more atonal than MOST of the Jefferson Airplane material, with none of the Airplane's "folk" backround in their songs. The VU comparison comes from the flipped out violin solos that pop up now and then. (It does remind you of the atonal chaos of a good John Cale solo ala 1968.) But the guitars are almost ALWAYS electric, and ALWAYS turned up loud, providing a distorted, overdriven haze to their sound. A beautiful exception is CERBERUS, an instrumental acoustic piece, that has acoustic guitar leads weaving in and out of a sonic miasma of bongos, bass, and vocalizations. Then it turns electric for no good reason, reinforcing the chaos that permeates the album's core sound.

Renate, the female singer, loves singing slightly out of key, giving her voice a "dark", keening sound, with melodic shapes that jump up and down randomly on the soundscape. When she's singing like that, with those strange guitar solos occuring concurrently, the colors bleed into a dense, deep sonic overload. YETI was recorded in 1970, after their first album, 1969's "PHALLUS DEI" nearly single handedly started the Krautrock movement. Like the Grateful Dead's short commune period at Haight st, AMON DUUL also arose from a hippie commune, with left wing political ideologies. (AMON DUUL "1", the more political arm of the commune, also put out several less musical albums. Amon Duul 1's music is hard to get into. They sound like Zappa's HELP I"M A ROCK, for album after album.) So if you can handle some freaky, free and funky musical experiments that definately arose from the use of spiked sugar cubes, and enjoy EARLY Pink Floyd, mixed with Jefferson Airplane's electric freak outs from AFTER BATHING AT BAXTERS, then YETI is a safe bet. If calling the album KRAUTROCK brings up visions of drum machines, and KRAFTWERK's electronic new wave sound, or Tangerine Dreams long, ambient synthesizer experiments, DONT WORRY. More than other KRAUTROCK bands, AMON DUUL's first 3 albums are FLUID ACID ROCK, far from the pop psychedelia of other less adventurous bands exploring that style. Still, Amon Duul II's YETI is unique, unlike anything you might have heard from LONDON's or SAN FRANSISCO's acid rock jam bands from that era. That's what makes Yeti's sound such a fun surprise when you start to groove into it."