Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback.

"A true tall tale that unfolds like the Great Unwritten Cold War Rock Novel, Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback traces how a beat-crazy combo formed by five bored US soldiers stationed in West Germany in 1964 evolved into an ambitious, time-sanctified art-punk project," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

"One of the featured points is that the band's two German, art-school-trained manager-conceptualists, Walther Niemann and Karl-H Remy (neither interviewed here), were primary in defining the group's grudging aesthetic and jingle-repetitive lyrics," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "Before being drilled into Bauhaus sternness by the brainy Teutons, the Monks were a good-but-one-in-a-thousand bar band called the Torquays - afterward, they were wearing tonsures and barking down the Vietnam War."

Updated through 10/31.

Opens at Anthology Film Archives on Friday; for more pullquotes and the trailer, see the site.

Update, 10/31: "Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback, an ambitious but unfocused documentary by the filmmakers Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios, bids to immortalize this short-lived if influential group," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "The case is compelling - the Monks had an amazing sound that anticipated the avant-garde pop of the Velvet Underground - and a little hysterical: one of the band's admirers claims that the social upheavals of 1968 would have happened two years earlier if everyone had been listening to the band."

Posted by dwhudson at October 29, 2008 11:06 AM