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elcome to the Digital Meltd0wn Music Blog. The aim of this blog is to introduce the readers to music that is out of print, commercially unavailable, released under a creative commons license, or with approval by the featured artist. The majority of the music posted here would be considered underground. Don't let that fool you into thinking that the music featured here might be any less enjoyable than that of the mainstream artists you hear on the radio, as this couldn't be further from the truth. Please keep in mind that the majority of the artists that appear on this blog, along with their respective record labels, are not wealthy and need your support. If you enjoy the material that you find here, please support the artists/labels by purchasing their material afterwards. If you are an artist/label that would prefer to have your material removed from this blog, simply leave me a comment, and I would be more than happy to promptly remove the offending post. In addition to running this blog, I also work on a few other projects during my spare time. You can find links to those, as well as a few other important links associated with Digital Meltd0wn in the menu bar above.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

The Monks - Black Monk Time


This is the soundtrack to one of the most bizarre stories in rock and roll. In 1966, five American GI's stationed in Germany decided to form a band designed to disturb people. Calling themselves The Monks, they shaved their heads, donned black robes and pounded out impossibly primitive songs like "I Hate You", "Complication" and "Shut Up". Radical stuff for audiences in the midst of Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" infatuation; predictably, their album went nowhere. This was, after all, an ocean away and a year before The Velvet Underground's first experiments with atonal noise, and a full 10 years before the punk explosion.

Three decades later, this reissue of The Monk's only album finds them still out of time, but slightly more acceptable to audiences. Only slightly - this is Very Wacky stuff. With pulsing fuzzbox bass, slashing electric banjo, tribal drums and deliberately amateur organ squeals, The Monks thumped out quasi-surf cacophony, two-chord rants, angst polkas and surprisingly catchy melodies yelped by "singer" Gary Burger with a dark, campy sense of humor.

There's nothing to these songs but raw energy and primal rhythms, with a lyric or two (at most) tossed in for emphasis, like "I hate you with a passion baby, but call me". That's all you get for 3 minutes, and that's all you need. Call them the first punks, call them angry delirious Beat poets, but any way you slice it, whether avant-garde weirdness, garage rock or vicious punk, these guys did it first.

Track List:
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
13. I Can't Get Over You [*]
14. Cuckoo [*]
15. Love Can Tame the Wild [*]
16. He Went Down to the Sea [*]

[*] - Reissue Bonus Tracks

Download: The Monks - Black Monk Time (42.9MB)

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ohh, man THIS is cool!!!
Request time: Electric Eels "The Eyeball Of Hell" !!!
Thanks for having one of the coolest sites around!!!
/TommyGun.

Zer0_II said...

Thanks for the compliment TG. I'll see what I can do about finding the Electric Eels album.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for The Monks, zerO_ii. One of the very first punk albums for me. Your blog is just too good to be true !
A few suggestions if you don't mind : The Modern Lovers (punk), Père Ubu (new wave) and Ian Dury (pub rock).
I think many people would enjoy these.

Slobodan Burgher said...

Thanks for this. Incidentially they apparently played in London Saturday last but I only heard about it last night.

TommyGun: there's a Electric Eils LP on my blog if you're interested...

Anonymous said...

hello
they also played in zürich on saturday the 21.10.06. it was a great concert and i also took some photos. so if you're interested in i can upload some of them.
supernova

Anonymous said...

I've been looking for this album for years. Now I can die happy!!! Thanks man, and good work on the Aussie material. If you know where we can get some Meanies, Hard-ons, Celibate Rifles, Exploding White Mice, etc share it with us. Keep up the good work.

Zer0_II said...

Anonymous 2: I would love to see the pictures. Thanks

Anonymous 3: Thanks for the compliment.. I'm trying my best to find more Aussie bands, including the ones you mentioned, but they're very hard to find. I'm also looking for more stuff by the Lime Spiders, Died Pretty, New Christs, etc.

Anonymous said...

I get a broken .rar file. Won't open.

Anonymous said...

I get a broken .rar file. Won't open.

Anonymous said...

hi there
please do me a big favour and repost
the Monks album.

richard

Anonymous said...

link is dead...