This is the one. Across the four albums of Amon Duul II covered on this site, one keeps coming up as the pole everything else is measured against, and this is it: Tanz der Lemminge, Dance of the Lemmings, the double LP most people call the band’s masterpiece and one of the greatest records the entire Krautrock scene produced. Three of its four sides are single side-long suites, each led by a different member, and the whole thing is an hour and eight minutes of a band shooting down every barrier it can find. If you only hear one Amon Duul II record, hear this.

The short version

Their third album, released in March 1971 on Liberty; a double LP running sixty-eight minutes, structured as four side-long pieces. The band recorded it as a quintet: Chris Karrer on guitar and violin, John Weinzierl on guitar, Falk Rogner on organ, Peter Leopold on drums, and a new bassist, Lothar Meid, a Passport co-founder. Singer Renate Knaup sat almost the entire album out, appearing on just one passage. Al Gromer, later of Popol Vuh, guests on sitar, and Jimmy Jackson on keyboards. The three main suites were written one each by Karrer, Weinzierl and Rogner; the last side is communal. It arrived one month after the previous album, Yeti, had been named album of the year.

The structure

The design is the statement. Each of the first three sides holds one long, titled suite, and each is essentially the vision of one member handed the room to realise it. Karrer takes the first with Syntelman’s March of the Roaring Seventies; Weinzierl takes the second with Restless Skylight-Transistor-Child; Rogner takes the third, the Chamsin Soundtrack, written for a film almost nobody has seen. The fourth side is the band together. This is not a concept album in the storytelling sense — the suites are built from short, sharply contrasting sections that switch between aggression and stillness with no warning — but the ambition is total, and unlike the earlier records it is composed as much as improvised. A band that had made its name on jamming sat down and wrote, and the discipline is exactly what lifts it above even Yeti.

The sound

An explosion of music, all over the map, and yet controlled in a way the debut never tried to be. Syntelman’s March is the most loved side — rocking Krautrock, acoustic interludes, electronic effects, surreal words and wild experiment, moving away from folk toward an almost playful classical sense of space. Restless Skylight is the strangest, the same formula taken to crazed heights with harder rock and stranger sound, and it is where Karrer and Weinzierl’s guitars really burn. The Chamsin Soundtrack trades variety for slow menace — the noisiest, most abstract thing in the whole catalogue, a mood piece of growling organ and echoed guitar that never loses its grip. Sitar, mellotron, mock choirs, brain-bending effects: it is 1971 stretched about as far as anyone stretched it that year, and 1971 was not a quiet year for ambition.

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The songs

Syntelman’s March of the Roaring Seventies runs sixteen minutes across four movements — In the Glassgarden, Pull Down Your Mask, Prayer to the Silence, Telephonecomplex — and is the perfect, most widely liked stretch of the album. Restless Skylight-Transistor-Child is nearly twenty minutes in seven parts, fragmented and aggressive and subtle by turns, with the one passage where Meid and Knaup sing together over guitars, synths and mock choirs — particularly fine, and the album’s trippiest few minutes. The Marilyn Monroe-Memorial-Church takes the whole of side three, eighteen minutes of near-structureless improv built entirely on mood and menace. And the short pieces close it out — Chewing Gum Telegram, Stumbling Over Melted Moonlight, Toxicological Whispering, that last one a guitar jam that sounds like it is coming from somewhere eternal.

Reception and legacy

It is, by wide agreement, the keystone of the catalogue and one of the defining Krautrock albums, routinely placed among the greatest the genre produced. It earned the band the right, as one writer put it, to stop there with their dignity intact — they did not, and the later pop turns and the rock opera all live in the shadow of this. The distance between Tanz der Lemminge and what came after is the whole shape of the band’s story: this is the peak of the wild years, before the studio and the sessions and the deliberate reach for the charts. Meid stayed on and would define the mid-period sound; Knaup returned to the front. Nothing they did later is bigger than this, and they knew it.

The verdict

Essential, and the single Amon Duul II album to own if you own one. It is long, demanding and worth every minute; give it an uninterrupted hour and the barriers really do come down. Play Syntelman’s March of the Roaring Seventies first and Restless Skylight-Transistor-Child second, and save the Chamsin Soundtrack for the dark. Then Yeti for the wild record just before it, Phallus Dei for the beginning, and Made in Germany for how far the same band would eventually travel from here. The dance of the lemmings, an hour long, and the high-water mark of one of Germany’s greatest bands.

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