5.27.2011
Video Shoot in los Angeles
5.24.2011
Rammstein rocks more than the crotch cannon
It’s rare when musicians melt their own faces, especially when it’s a warm-up for flaming angel wings, crowd surfing in a rubber boat and offing the keyboardist with fireworks and a trick bathtub.
Rammstein’s stage show is a graphic love letter to shock and awe. Sixteen years after their debut album Herzeleid inspired the genre Neue Deutsche Härte (new German hardness), the band is breathtaking—kind of like a beautiful woman wrapped in barbed wire. Here are 10 elements of the performance I’ll never forget:
1) Most bands quietly wander onstage before the lights come up. Rammstein busted through the wall with real pickaxes.
2) Lead singer Till Lindemann’s mouth light is in its own class of creepy. Apparently, he had a piercing done for the “Ich Tu Dir Weh” video so the LED could be mounted to a cable running through his cheek, though I hear the current device is a bit less macabre.
3) The mosh pit was legitimately violent, with the MVP award split between a Viking knocking people’s heads together like coconuts and a lone woman watching lesser men ricochet off her considerable chest.
4) Resident gimp Christian "Flake" Lorenz could sell out a one-man show with his signature dance alone. While playing multiple keyboards and dodging projectiles tossed by his band-mates, he marched on a treadmill through most of the show. I'll bet he was chewing gum too.
5) The bouncers were a bright yellow line of stillness in a sea of black and red chaos, almost like a protest photo.
6) From the depths of the writhing pit a pair of crutches pumped up and down to the beat. I saw this guy outside the venue, and it looked like both his ankles were broken …
7) At the end of “Feuer Frei,” Lindemann and guitarists Richard Z. Kruspe and Paul H. Landers sang through flamethrowers strapped to their faces—just one dish in the show’s pyrotechnic feast.
8) “Wiener Blut” began with Lindemann crawling around and tongue darting next to a gramophone and the lamp from my grandma’s living room. Then green lasers spun down from the rafters, beaming from the eyes of hanging baby dolls. At the end of the song, mini-explosions blew them off their tethers to the stage below, and bassist Oliver Riedel played a soulful interlude in the ghoulish pile.
9) The visual spectacle reached its climax (I couldn’t resist) when Lindemann mounted a giant cannon and sprayed his frenzied worshipers with white goo.
10) After an evening of being violated and deafened, I was charmed when the band took an old-school bow and politely thanked the audience. It was a spoonful of sugar that helped the medicine of rot and hate and darkness go down.
Rammstein at Thomas & Mack Center
Rammstein: Industrial metal with a fun, sexy flavor
With a few exceptions, heavy metal has traditionally been as bereft of sexiness as it has been of bright, pastel-colored wardrobes, songs about the joys of macramé and "Cat Fancy" subscriptions.
Was this forever changed by the giant, phallus-shaped canon that looked like a cross between a cement mixer and male genitalia that shot white foam all over the crowd at the Thomas & Mack Center on Saturday?
Probably not, but give the leather lovin' Lotharios in the German industrial metal sextet Rammstein some credit for trying, at least.
The song in question was a title too ribald for print, though it doubles as a Lord Byron-worthy paen to the lady folk with such inviting lines as "Steck bratwurst in dein sauerkraut," which translates to "put a Bratwrust in your sauerkraut."
No, the tune was not about Teutonic culinary techniques, though, during the course of its muscular digital throb, certain things did get devoured.
The song's sonics approximated the wild sex the band sang of, all hard, driving rhythmic thrust with a dense tangle of sub-thrash riffing leavened with Depeche Mode-esque synth lines and singer Till Lindemann's basso profundo rumble, which frequently escalates to a stirring upper register bellow.
It sounds like the earthshaking rancor of armed conflict, but unlike most metal bands, there's little to no menace -- articulated or implied -- in Rammstein's carnal, heavy breathing catalog.
The only time these dudes get a little rough is in the bedroom.
The title of their latest disc, "Liebe ist für alle da, translates to "Love is for Everyone," which is tongue-in-cheek, to be sure, but still, it underscores a winking self-awareness and sense of humor that's as hard to find among most hard-edged bands as a fan base heavy on grandmas.
To wit: Lindemann, a champion swimmer in his younger days, has the beefy, thick-shouldered frame of an NFL defensive end, but he deflates his intimidating physical presence with a series of goofy, bug-eyed, Jerry Lewis-worthy faces, wagging his tongue and lumbering about the stage like a drunk Frankenstein.
For the most part, the kind of severe electro metal that Rammstein trades in tends to be about as jovial as an open casket funeral, but this show was as fun as it was fierce-sounding, with enough explosions, flames and things going bang to rival the Battle of Verdun.
Thick clouds of smoke and the distinct, acrid scent of sulfur filled the Thomas & Mack, as sparks rained down from the rafters and plumes of fire shot up from the stage while Lindemann wielded, in succession, a massive rifle that shot explosives, a welding torch and a flamethrower, setting a crew member who acted as if he was a fan invading the stage ablaze at one point.
There were so many sudden, surprise detonations that the crowd continually jumped in their seats, as if they were seeing "The Exorcist" for the first time.
This was porno for pyros for real.
And Lindemann acknowledged as much.
"Kein heroin kein alkohol kein nikotin / Brauch keine hilfe / Kein koffein / Doch dynamit und terpentin," he sang on "Benzin" ("Don't need heroin nor alcohol nor nicotine / I don't need help / Nor caffeine / But I do need dynamite and turpentine.")
He'd explain why a few verses later: "Willst du dich von etwas trennen, dann musst du es verbrennen."
Translation: "If you want to part with something then you have to incinerate it."
And with that, subtlety, restraint and lots of flash pots were reduced to ash.
Live review: Rammstein at the Forum
Rammstein is not a band built for subtlety. It is tribal metal for your midnight ride to the Euro disco, a precise construction of Teutonic grunts, computers and electric guitars led by singer Till Lindemann, an ex-Olympics-level swimmer with the voice of Nosferatu. For non-German speakers, he might as well be singing of daisies and unicorns, except you know he isn’t.
Tours of the U.S. are rare for the Berlin industrial-metal act, so the Forum in Inglewood was packed Friday with fans ready for a brutal, action-packed pummeling. They were rewarded with thundering beats and guitars and pillars of fire right at the front of the stage — close enough to nearly scorch the first rows of fans surging forward.
Explosions and fireballs weren’t reserved only for peak moments but used for virtually every song. A growling “Wiener Blut” delivered exploding plastic babies with laser-beam eyes, and “Feuer Frei!” erupted with shouts of “bang, bang!” before band members put on facemasks with built-in flamethrowers.
Dressed something like Gothic foundry workers and standing on a stage resembling an industrial torture chamber, Rammstein blended Fritz Lang and “Saw IV,” with lots of moving parts and billowing fog. The commitment to excessive pyromania was epic stagecraft on a Wagnerian scale, several notches up from most arena rock.
More important was that the six-piece band — in addition to Lindemann, guitarists Richard Z. Kruspe and Paul H. Landers, keyboardist Christian “Flake” Lorenz, bassist Ollie Riedel and drummer Christoph Schneider – wasn’t dependent on those fireworks but could have easily punished and soothed the senses to nearly the same effect with music alone.
From the band’s earliest albums, beginning with 1995’s “Herzeleid” (a.k.a. “Suffering”) and 1997’s “Sehnsucht” (“Longing”), Rammstein has been as satisfying to metalheads as to the urges of modern electronic dance music, comfortably blending worlds without compromise. At times, the songs swung between the blips and beeps and slabs of industrial buzzsaw guitars as Lindemann grunted and wept of sadomasochistic woe. “Du Hast” was a raging, swirling anthem on love and hate, genuinely melodic amid the heavy riffing and operatic self-loathing.
From the band’s newest album, 2009’s “Liebe Ist für Alle Da,” came the wistful, lustful ballad “Frühling in Paris,” which still inspired some sharp elbows in the mosh pits, spinning slowly to the urgent plucking of acoustic guitar. Lindemann’s vocals burned of anger and real vulnerability, something too rare in modern hard rock, making Rammstein a band of metal doomsayers with a tough, tender touch.
For nearly two hours at the Forum, the effect was so serious and driven that the result could be as funny as it was unsettling. And yet the sextet was also less rigid than one might expect, finding melody amid the morbid and melodramatic, fueling the rage and morose sing-alongs.
One notorious song from the last album urged immediate fornication (with a title unprintable here), and climaxed with Lindemann saddling himself onto a cannon that sprayed fans with foam. Maybe it was fire-retardant.
Rammstein at the Forum on Friday Night
Rammstein
May 20, 2011
The Forum If you're reading this right now, then the rapture didn't happen. But if you're reading this right now and didn't go to the Rammstein show at The Form on Friday night, then you did not adequately prepare for what very well could have been the rapture.
Only a few songs into the set (finding the correct entrance was not fun) the interior colonnade was already filled with a source-less, sweaty fog. The main arena was no less eerie, with a dungeon-esque stage design worthy of a Blade Runner remake that quickly hosted the night's first of many special effects stunts.
With guitarists Richard Kruspe and Paul Landers standing on either side of singer Till Lindemann, the threesome donned flamethrower-equipped masks that shot 10-foot flames towards one another as they somehow still managed to play through "Feuer Frei!"--known to most American fans as "the bang-bang song" for its onomatopoeia-filled chorus, but appropriately named "Fire Freely!"
No one seemed to mind the heat, which was reminiscent of Universal Studios' Flashback attraction, and the entire two-minute-long spectacle--which finished with an amazing drum solo from Christoph "Doom" Schneider--left fans cheering for more.
Before anyone could recover from the fire-emitting face masks, however, three chandeliers made of scuffed up dead-baby dolls slowly dropped down from the rafters. As the next song ("Weiner Blut") built in intensity, they one-by-one lit up with green LED eyes and during its final notes, were ejected from the apparatus as mortar hits shot from either side of the stage.
After slowing down the tempo and turning on the red lights for "Frühling in Paris," a love song/power ballad, Keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz--who had until then remained a subtle accessory--emerged from under stage wearing a rainbow sequin full-body flared jumpsuit.
He awkwardly shuffled back to his elevated post between two keyboards and began to walk on a treadmill that materialized below his feet. The next two songs were keyboard-minimal, so he marched on like a backup dancer who had stumbled upon leftovers from the Forum's last few weeks of Prince shows, owning every glittery second of spotlight.
Fan favorites "Du riechst so gut," "Benzin," and "Du Hast" came next with accompanying pyrotechnics for each, but it was the final songs of the set that brought out some of Rammstein's craziest antics.
Sexual symbolism pervaded the entire evening (Lindemann's crotch grabbing and forced-fellation pantomime did not go unnoticed), but it was during "Pussy," the supposed last song, that it found its most obvious manifest. A skin-colored cannon was rolled out into the buffer zone between the pit and stage and as the guitars went wild, Lindemann mounted the phallic prop and proceeded to ride it back and forth while it spewed fake snow across the first few rows of the audience.
Two more encores followed, epically finishing the night with "Engel," a grand finale that featured Lindemann wearing metal angel wings that shot fire out of the tips of its impressive 20-foot wingspan. And if an intensely futuristic German version of the Archangel Gabriel isn't a perfect enough send-off into the apocalypse, then the final 30-seconds worth of loud-as-hell, all-or-nothing fireworks, flames, pyrostrobes and flash trays definitely was.
Critic's Bias: I'm always looking for an excuse to headbang.
The Crowd: At least 80 percent dudes with a 50/50 split between people that wear patent leather costumes and are serious about it and regular college students feeding their dark side.
Overheard in the Crowd: "Exploding babies with laser eyes?! I'm so glad I'm peaking on mushrooms!"
Random notebook dump: Feeling guilty for not understanding German. He could be talking about the finer points of communism and we'd still all cheer at the fireworks.
Setlist:
Rammlied
B*******
Weidmann's Heil
Keine Lust
Weisses Fleisch
Feuer Frei
Wiener Blut
Frühling in Paris
Ich tu dir weh
Du riechst so gut
Benzin
Links 2-3-4
Du Hast
Pussy
Sonne
Haifisch
Ich Will
Engel
5.21.2011
Live Review: Rammstein at The Forum
WHO: Rammstein
WHERE: The Forum
WHEN: 5/20/11
The show at The Forum was surreal. We've seen hundreds of shows of all genres on all scales but there is truly nothing like a Rammstein show. For the majority of attendees this was the first time they had ever seen Rammstein, or any show of this scale.
Friday night was headed in a bad direction: The box office had lost an entire group of media passes. As we stood at the ramp, patiently waiting alongside several other victims of the same fate we heard it, the first explosive bang of the night. Everyone looked around, silently sharing the anguish. We were all being denied epic amounts of epic.
Loads of the dirty little details:
From outside we could hear "Rammlied" and "Weidmann's Hell" playing. Moments later somebody came out waving envelopes, at last, the golden ticket! They were handed out and everyone was rushed in.
Rammstein promised Los Angeles an incredible show and they delivered in spades. With production that makes KISS and Lady Gaga look lazy, Rammstein boldly stomped their way through the set. All the while, the staff of The Forum gathered in the walk ways, pointing at the stage and looking utterly confused.
The raw display of power lasted nearly two hours. There were enormous lights that smoothly crept in and out of the rafters and an enormous HR Giger-esque stage with moving risers. And, of course, there were a half dozen fire trucks outside for a reason, fire, lots and lots of fire. Fire from the floor, fire from the ceiling, people on fire, fire from Rammstein's faces, fire was everywhere.
The heat was tremendous, even at far distances. The folks on the floor however got the full shock and awe experience they came for.
For "Fire Frei" they brought a fan favorite stunt that involves strapping flame throwers to their faces. Yes, you read that right, flame throwers to their faces. It's not a new stunt but possibly their most impressive.
New stunts include an enormous penis Lindemann rides that shoots foam at the end of "Pussy" covering everything in a thick layer of white something-or-other. The staff didn't seem to enjoy the joke nearly as much as the fans.
They played "Frühling in Paris," which may be their best ballad to date, and we're not just saying that because it takes from the Edith Piaf song "Non, je ne regretted rien."
Of course they brought out the boat, but not until the encore during the song "Haifisch," from their new album. Every Rammstein fan knows about the boat. They put Flake in it and send him out to the fans, a stunt he clearly seems to despise.
Whether or not "Du Hast" is a personal favorite, what happened at The Forum Friday night was staggering.
The show was enormously satisfying, from beginning to end, and it's a sad morning for anybody who missed it.
Rammstein Interview
Band Name: Rammstein
Interviewed: Richard Kruspe
Interviewer: Jason Fisher
Date: 2011-05-20
In Pictures: Rammstein in Oakland, CA
Touring the U.S. for the first time in a decade, German goth-metal band Rammstein is currently stateside, lighting up stages with their signature pyrotechnic-laden show in support of their new album "Leibe Ist Fur Alle Da." Wednesday night (5/18).
The band's most recent stop was at Oracle Arena in Oakland, CA. In a review published yesterday by the Oakland Tribune, veteran music writer Jim Harrington gave an enthusiastic thumbs up to the group's antics, saying "They don't need any of the wild theatrics to make their music interesting and keep concertgoers awake. (In other words, Rammstein isn't Gwar.) Yet, the band has chosen to fill nearly every second onstage with some type of visual element." Next stop on Rammstein's itinerary is tonight (5/20) at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, CA.
SoundSpike photographer Tim Mosenfelder was among the media on the scene to capture some of the antics at the band's Oakland show, and here are some of his best shots.
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