LEMMINGMANIA

For the first time since High School I actually got Christmas week off right up to New Years Day. This is significant because I now wanted a sountrack for this time but it had to be something I hadn't reviewed yet, so I picked this compilation album from my favourite Krautrock band. This was released back in 1975 and it does seem strange having an AMON DUUL II record that consists of songs all under or around 5 minutes in length. Chis Karrer one of my musical heroes once said of his band AMON DUUL II that "Improvisation was everything". Chris is a multi-instrumentalist playing mostly guitar, sax and violin and he was right, it's what most AD II fans love about this band. Still I just love their sound which is why I picked this one up despite that there are no songs from their masterpiece "Phallus Dei".

I'm not going to review this song by song because i've already done that with most of these but I will focus on the four previously(at the time) unreleased tunes. I do have two of those unreleased tracks as bonus songs on the "Yeti" edition I have, and they are "Between The Eyes" and "Rattlesnakeplumcake". The former is rather dark and heavy with some brief crazy vocals and prominant guitar while the latter has male and female vocals with some excellent violin play on it. There are two songs on here that I haven't heard before. One is "Light" which was an earlier version of "Stumbling Over Melted Moonlight" from the "Tanz Der Lemminge" album. This one has vocals on it and I quite like it even if it is fairly straight-forward. The other is the title track which is my favourite on here. It was apparently released as a single back in the day but it sounds so different from their usual sound. This is a very uplifting, heavenly sounding track that simply transports me. Kind of like some of those SENSTIONS' FIX songs. Just a great instrumental.

My edition has four bonus tracks all from the "Viva La Trance" record. There are so many excellent tracks one here that for the enjoyment level alone I have to give this 4 stars.