Spectacle is part of the band’s creative process, Till Lindemann Rammstein says. “When we’re writing or creating, we think about how people could react (live) or how we can set the stage.”
MONTREAL - Berlin’s Rammstein is an imposing band in both size and sound. On their albums, the sextet play a dense brand of electronica-influenced industrial rock. And their stage show is notorious for its excess, full of pyrotechnics and heavy machinery, like a factory that makes steampunk robots out of German Expressionism and oversized rivets.
Thursday night’s concert at the Bell Centre – the only Canadian date on their current tour – was no exception. According to bassist Oliver Riedel in an interview before the show, Rammstein used a February show in Quebec City to gauge the North American audience’s tolerance to the band’s more extravagant flourishes.
“Quebec was a test to see how people would react,” Riedel said through a translator. “Today will be the first time that we bring over the European show … (it will be) wilder and bigger.”
Before a packed house of almost 14,000, the band delivered on that promise. They took the stage in black leather, muscles bulging and faces glowering with the menace of a chthonic Mr. Universe pageant. It was high drama from the outset: Shakespeare in Vulcan’s forge as they launched into Rammlied, from the band’s newest album Liebe ist für alle da.
Formed in 1994, Rammstein made an impact early in their career, with two songs from their 1995 debut Herzeleid featured on the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Their techno samples, synth runs, groove-heavy guitars and martial rhythms helped define a new brand of German industrial music known as Neue Deutsche Härte, a rock/electronica crossover best described as Laibach entombed in one of Pantera’s amplifiers. And vocalist Till Lindemann’s distinctive voice – deep, stern and dramatic, like getting a lecture from an ogre – gave the band an instantly recognizable sound. This, says Riedel, is a product of each member’s varied musical backgrounds. “All of our influences reflect in what we’re writing,” he says, “even though some of us have different tastes, it always comes together at the end.”
The band’s second album, 1997’s Sehnsucht, spawned the international hit Du Hast, and the band has gone on to sell millions of records worldwide, despite singing primarily in German. A host of controversies, from being sued by a German cannibal for making him the subject of a song to releasing quickly banned videos featuring graphic sexuality, has kept them in the public eye. In a trip to the United States, the band was arrested after simulating a sex act on stage in Worcester, Mass. “Till and Flake (keyboardist/sampler Christian Lorenz) provoked a few people, and we had to spend a night in jail,” he explains. “The daughter of the mayor was at the concert.”
Riedel says exploring boundaries is always a deliberate act, “We try to create controversy and be wild,” he says, but the consequences are not always intended. “We don’t set out to work and say, ‘We hope this video doesn’t make it to German television,’ ” Riedel explains, “but we do try and make it controversial and do something special.”
For the most part, Thursday night’s show wasn’t particularly explicit, at least until the foam-spewing phallus/cannon showed up at the end for recent single Pu—y. But it was certainly theatrical, from the first pyro blasts to the gas masks hacked to spew fire during the driving Feuer Frei!, from 2001’s Mutter. And during the catchy, hook-laden Benzin, taken from 2005’s Rosenrot, a would-be crowd surfer was set ablaze with a gas pump-turned-flame-thrower in what was either a staged set-piece or a war crime. When something wasn’t burning, wiry keyboardist Lorenz took the spotlight with bizarre, spastic dance solos, as if channelling both an interpretive dance piece and an electrocution. All in all, it was an astonishing show.
This sort of spectacle, says Riedel, is an integral part of the band’s creative process. “When we’re writing or creating, we think about how people could react (live) or how we can set the stage.”
And then, of course, there was the actual music. While Rammstein’s obsession with technology can cause them to sound overly processed on disc, their live performance has just enough of a ragged edge to bring the material to life. The powerful B******** featured gunshot snare strikes from drummer Christoph Schneider and a particularly harsh vocal from Lindemann, who sucked in deep growls like an asthmatic dragon. Du Riechst So Gut had a solid guitar chug – courtesy of Richard Kruspe and Paul Landers – beneath a blaring techno beat, while Engel had an insistent, catchy bass line from Riedel. The sound was powerful and crushingly heavy, likely leaving dents in the appreciative audience.
The elaborate show did occasionally verge on the ridiculous, like the array of hanged baby dolls that exploded mid-set, or Lorenz riding a lifeboat over the crowd while dressed as a disco ball. And unless you like the idea of a lullaby sung in the voice of bellowing Titan, the booming Frühling in Paris may have sounded a touch silly. But excess was clearly the battle plan for Rammstein, and the war was won long before the enormous pink artillery arrived.
The show was opened by Norway’s Combichrist. Dressed like Cenobite DJs, the group delivered a fierce set of aggrotech, a violent form of electronica that sounds like a computer after downloading too many ’80s hardcore albums.
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