j o e

If you are expecting melody, if you are expecting heavenly vocals and exquisite musicianship, if you are expecting intricate time signatures or music to cuddle up with that sweet young thing on those rainy nights...put those expectations firmly away. Because what you are going to get when you pop Psychedelic Underground into your CD player is 40 minutes worth of undiluted, hallucinogenic mayhem. Incredibly enough, this is couched as a concept album, about three friends in search of a legendary fountain at the top of a mountain. Still, this really couldn't be described as a prog rock album so much as like being locked in an asylum overnight with severe acid casualties who have just handed you a pair of bongos at gunpoint. This is a marching band of drug-induced psychosis: tribal drumming in unrelenting 4/4 merging with fuzzed-out, barely coherent acoustic guitar and even less coherent yelling, and random splices of outside music (ostensibly from a local classical music station?) thrown in without warning as if the album weren't too far gone already. Definitely one of those love it or hate it deals, and for every one of the former I can guarantee you there will be 10 of the latter. For myself, I have to be in the right mood to play this one, and almost never play it. But when I do, I always enjoy the lunacy of Mama Düül's sauerkraut band. review by Joe McGlinchey — undated —