Recently I’ve been filling in the cracks of my Amon Duul awareness, and in so doing read a lot of online commentary and reviews about their career. Generally such overviews conclude along the lines of “in 1974 they made an album called Hi-Jack, which sucks, and nothing after that is worth hearing.” 

LIES I TELL YOU! Because 1975’s “Made In Germany” is actually the best of their post-freakout albums (by which I mean all those coming after 1971’s “Tanz der Lemminge.”)

After those early freaky records the Duul tried to be more like a conventional rock band with shorter songs such as you might actually hear on the radio, which sometimes worked quite well (“Wolf City” LP) and sometimes not so well (“Hi-Jack” which isn’t actually THAT bad, at least not all of it.) But even then “Germany” is kind of unique in their catalog, because it’s not just more “conventional” it’s outright “pop music” with hummable singalong melodies and catchy swingin’ arrangements.

For some reason the sound & vibe of the album makes me think this is what Jefferson Airplane would have sounded like by 1975 if they hadn’t imploded in a haze of hard drugs, egos and fuzzy politics. Because Renate Knaup is the teutonic Grace Slick! Her voice has the same icy beauty, and the lyrics she sings have the same sly countercultural wink. I don’t think any of the other Duul albums really use her vocal talents as well as this one.

It’s also something of a concept album, the concept being “German history” more-or-less. But thankfully it’s not too serious about that, it’s more a case of the lyrics having a unifying theme and the way the record is sequenced: it begins with a Straussian classical overture, then about 10 catchy pop tunes are interspersed with brief krautrockische instrumental interludes, and it ends with a smokin’ jam on the traditional tune “La Paloma” (here retitled “La Krautoma.”) 

It was also a somewhat controversial record, most obviously because of a fake radio interview between an annoying “American Top 40 DJ” (who asks questions in English) and Adolf Hitler (who answers in German via actual snippets from Hitler speeches!) Of course they were making fun of him, but Nazism being such an uber-taboo subject I can see how some of the not-forward-thinking would be offended by the joke (the double LP was re-released as a single LP without the Hitler bit, and a lot of other stuff.) Similarly you could miss the irony when they sing “Wilhelm, Wilhelm, the nation needs you!” referring to the old Kaiser. But of course I give them gold stars for being brave enough to sing about such things!

Among my favorite tracks are the bouncy prog-pomp of “Wilhelm, Wilhelm” which is a sort of acid-befuddled call to bring back the Kaiser and has lyrics alternating between German, French and English. Also “The Emigrant Song” which has a banjo (!) and is sung in (deliberately) heavily accented English: “zee Krauts are coming to zee U.S.A.” (pronounced auf Deutsch as “ooo-ess-ahhh.”) And “Loosey Girls” which is a haunting melancholy rock version of Marelene Dietrich/cabaret music. There’s also tunes about Fritz Lang (“Metropolis”) and Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.

But my favorite of all is the jaunty pop of “Wide-Angle” with the lovely Renate at her best reminiscing about those old acid-gobbling days on the commune but then today we’re all “drinking compromise cocktails.” A great song from the days after the hippy dream collapsed.

This albums strikes me as their most lyrically profound (almost the only Duul album where I pay attention to the lyrics in fact.) And although it may sound like a shocking “sellout” if you’re used to their sound on rightly celebrated albums like “Yeti” and “Phallus Dei”, it’s actually quite stellar if you take it on it’s own terms.

The very definition of “unsung”!