Black Monk Time

Background

The album was produced by Jimmy Bowien and recorded March 1965 in Cologne, Germany. "Complication" b/w "Oh, How to Do Now" was released as a single to promote the album. Like the album, it failed to garner commercial success. The single was re-issued in 2009 by Play Loud! Productions.

Critical reception

The album was initially released to a muted critical and commercial reception, but has since gone on to become widely critically acclaimed and is now viewed as an important protopunk album. Anthony Carew in a retrospective review for About.com called it "possibly the first punk record, and is the obvious birthplace of krautrock" and "one of the 'missing links' of alternative music history". The Daily Telegraph wrote, "Listening to it now, finally, in full, remastered glory, it's hard to imagine how this primitive and often nightmarish music could have been allowed to be made at that particular time and place. [...] It may not be to every taste but, lurching according to its own sublimely clueless logic, it has a purity and heedlessness which can never be repeated." Uncut wrote, "there's really nothing that can dull the impact of hearing the Monks' music for the first time."

Accolades

Legacy and impact

Black Monk Time was described in the mid-1990s by Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes as a "lost classic". Of the album's raw style, and the context of its production, Cope writes:

NO-ONE ever came up with a whole album of such dementia. The Monks' Black Monk Time is a gem born of isolation and the horrible deep-down knowledge that no-one is really listening to what your [sic] saying. And the Monks took full artistic advantage of their lucky/unlucky position as American rockers in a country that was desperate for the real thing. They wrote songs that would have been horribly mutilated by arrangers and producers had they been back in America. But there was no need for them to clean up their act, as the Beatles and others had had to do on returning home, for there were no artistic constraints in a country that liked the sound of beat music but had no idea about its lyric content.

In 2006 Play Loud! Productions released a Monks tribute album, the double-LP Silver Monk Time, featuring input from 29 international bands (including the original Monks) in conjunction with the film Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback.

English post-punk band The Fall has covered four of the album's songs: "I Hate You" and "Oh How to Do Now" on their 1990 album Extricate, "Shut Up" on their 1994 album Middle Class Revolt, and "Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy" on the 2006 Play Loud! Productions compilation Silver Monk Time.

"Monk Time" was featured in a 2000 Powerade advertisement.

Beastie Boys, Jack White of The White Stripes, and Colin Greenwood of Radiohead have praised the album.

Track listing

All tracks written by Gary Burger, Larry Clark, Dave Day, Roger Johnston and Eddie Shaw.

Personnel