To me, Yeti is does not fit comfortably in the Kraut rock canon at all. It's spiritual home is in the Dead's "Live/Dead " era psyhchedelia. I just happen to think the Dead did that kind of thing better.
I still cant see the comparison The Dead were great, and the live version of Dark Star is off Live/Dead is them captured on absolutely top form, but it is still a west cost acid blues work out (and theres nowt wrong with that). IMHO Yeti has nothing even remotely in common with it.
It is best to consider Yeti as two completely separate albums, record 1 is composed and arranged, record two is free improvisation.
The composed record is IMHO as perfect an aural assault ever to be captured in the history of recorded music I can not think of another record that keeps building layer upon layer with anything like the intensity (ok, Minguss Black Saint, but thats it). It is hugely powerful, incredibly complex yet remarkably and almost disturbingly un-rock. Listen to the structures and chord progressions, it is only the first few bars of Soap Shop Rock that have anything really to do with rock music at all. After those simple guitar chords it just builds and builds and builds until it is barely possible that it can build any more. Then it builds some more, and then some! By the time you get to the later part of side two where all the ring-modulated screeching comes in its fully cooked, there is nowhere left on this planet to take things. In many ways it is the worlds only successful prog-rock album; it has all the complexity and musicianship that genre admired so much, yet it is truly and uniquely organic and totally lacks the horrible stiltedness, gross willy showing and grotesquely clichéd pseudo-classical structure that blights all but a tiny minority of that genre. Düül II play as one ego-less and truly organic whole, there is no spotlight, everything is equally mindblowing they play like a great jazz band. Yeti is quite simply too good to be a prog album. I still don't really know what it is.
Record 2 of Yeti is comprised from three freeform improvisations, two possibly taking Floyds Interstellar Overdrive as a basic launching point, though only as that. This is as Krautrock as music gets, pure, totally free, totally improvised, totally not-rock. This is Syds Floyd playing free jazz. The last track, Sandoz in the Rain, sits almost uncomfortably on the album achingly beautiful though it may be. It is far more the hippy-Kraut-folk that one would expect from Düül I and sounds very reminiscent of much of the excellent Paradieswarts Düül.
Much as I like The Dead, Yeti is a
very different thing!
Tony.
