Black Monk Time reissued April 13 2009

The Monks used to be called the Torquays. They used to play surf music, cover Chuck Berry songs and serve as American GIs in Germany.

Then something happened; an epiphany of sorts. They left the army; ditched the pseudo-British name with its connotations of beat music, shaved their heads into monks’ tonsures and started playing the most rhythm-heavy progressive rock that had ever been heard.

Forty-three years after its original release, their only album Black Monk Time is being reissued and it has never sounded more current.

Roger Johnston’s fast percussion and the cynical, pithy rhetoric of Gary Burger’s lyrical is an obvious precursor to bands like Black-Flag, Dead Kennedy’s and The Descendents; punk landmarks.

“Monk Time” opens the album and spits out controversial polemic like, “Why do you kill all those kids out there in Vietnam? Mad Vietcong.” It is not just their ex-military history that makes the song stunning but its’ modern scuzzy arrangements; anarchic keyboard, unrelenting beat and raspy screams. They are political without standing on the soapbox.

Then comes a song like “I Hate You” which is painfully lamenting and so far ahead of its’ time, preceding the shoegaze sound.

The most inexorably engaging record I’ve ever heard. Where the donald duck has this been all my life?