Black Monk Time is the only studio album by German-based American garage rock band The Monks, released in March 1966 through Polydor Records. The album's subversive style and blunt lyrical content were radical for its time, and today it is considered an important landmark in the development of punk rock.

Background

The album was produced by Jimmy Bowien and recorded in November 1965 in Cologne, West 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. Black Monk Time was not officially released in the United States until 1994, as Polydor Records deemed the music too experimental for an American audience and too blunt in its condemnation of the Vietnam War at the time.

Critical reception

The album was initially met with a muted critical and commercial reception, but has since become widely critically acclaimed and is now viewed as an important proto-punk album. In a retrospective review for About.com, Anthony Carew called it "possibly the first punk record" and "one of the 'missing links' of alternative music history", also citing it as an influence on the German krautrock movement. Andrew Perry wrote in The Daily Telegraph in 2009: "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." According to Len Comaratta of Uncut, "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 later described by Julian Cope as a "lost classic" in his 1995 book Krautrocksampler. 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 you're 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, Silver Monk Time, featuring 29 international bands (including the original Monks), in conjunction with the film Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback. English post-punk band The Fall covered four of the album's songs: "I Hate You" and "Oh, How to Do Now" (as "Black Monk Theme Part I" and "Black Monk Theme Part II") on their 1990 album Extricate, "Shut Up" on their 1994 album Middle Class Revolt, and "Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy" on Silver Monk Time. "I Hate You" was featured in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. "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. "Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice" was featured in a commercial for the Apple iPhone in 2017. "We Do Wie Du" is featured in the 2017 film Logan Lucky.

Track listing

Personnel

Release history

This release includes extensive liner notes, including interviews and photographs