Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Arena / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: 18.03.2010
Attendance: 12
Ticket price: 390,00HRK (fan pit) / 360,00HRK (floor) / 290,00HRK (stands)
Looking to switch to another state of matter? Then you’re surely at the second-to-last date of Rammstein’s new European tour! Zagreb, Arena! The crowd of a good 10,000 heads that eventually packed the Arena didn’t quite trigger the pre-show ticket-chasing fever we saw for the Depeche Mode gig at the same venue this February. At a time when bands are pushing ticket prices to astronomical heights, it does happen that the masses hit back by showing weak purchasing power. Still, these are the years of concert euphoria, and the big names milk it for all it’s worth, even though their new albums no longer say much in musical terms, or at least nothing interesting, witty or fresh.
Well, with the German “lumberjacks” Rammstein, that certainly won’t hold true. Their shows are known for outright provocation, nicely dosed with just the right amount of shock therapy. For almost three hours the Arena turned into a cross between a shipyard buried somewhere deep under the earth’s crust, with coordinates known only to Lucifer. A godforsaken place, a place of temptation, hedonism and vice. It was quite a sight, strolling along an unbroken row of more than 20 parked double-decker tour buses, which announced all by themselves that hanging out with Rammstein comes with a pile of money that’s hard for ordinary mortals to imagine.
Punctual to the extreme! Support act Combichrist hit the stage at exactly the announced time. The Norwegian rowdies, a sort of mix of pounding industrial rhythms and electronics, looked kind of lost on the huge stage with their “modest” presence. Singer and chief entertainer Andy LaPlegua did everything he could to rouse the crowd, but it showed no particular signs of excitement, even though the front rows in the fan pit right under the stage were visibly more worked up. The Norwegians, with two drum kits and hypnotic keyboards that almost obsessively skimp on notes, built an avalanche of a blacksmith’s wall of sound, through which LaPlegua’s one-dimensional barking vocals cut. The band, who presented their current studio album “Today We Are All Demons” (2009) in Zagreb too, managed to get most of the floor on board for Fuck That Shit, and Blut Royale, which Combichrist dedicated to Rammstein, added fuel to the fire. As is the custom in industrial, extravagant attention-grabbing is simply part of the daily menu, compensating for weak technical, schooled command of the instruments. Tattoos, spiked hairdos, pierced nostrils and lips. On top of that, a generous helping of sampled patterns, mainly in charge of deepening the hypnotic rhythms supposedly generated by the snare drum, and they achieved their goal. With that Combichrist kept their cool and, after half an hour, handed the stage over to the night’s headliners, Rammstein.
The Arena went completely dark for the second time. An hour later, that is. This time it was the real deal. The German lumberjacks finally served up the promotion of their new record “Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da” (2009) on a platter. Since they didn’t want to become Laibach, they just became Rammstein. They took the obscure, awakening genre from the early nineties into the bosom of a huge commercial breakthrough and anchored themselves on the scene as a highly esteemed act. An act that feeds its fans with cunningly measured tricks, built on sparse but intensely dosed moves. Sparse in the musical sense, intense in terms of stage set and shock performance, richly backed by pyrotechnics. So is it worth it?
Truth be told, every single song was accompanied by some sensational effect conjured up by playing with fire. Fire from above, flames burning at the foot of the stage so you got the feeling Till Lindeman was burning up there (B********), a whole gas station on stage, a lift tower on which Lindeman climbed high toward the structure holding the upper set of floodlights with a bucket of “gasoline” and “showered” the people below with fire (the song Benzin, album “Rosenrot”, 2005)….In Wiener Blut a series of hanging newborn corpses appears on stage. Under green laser light, a dramatic scene unfolds. Lindeman and the crew are completely in a trance. A commanding, authoritative approach from the singer, who was practically being torn and twisted by all the eruptive energy lashing out from the stage and back onto it. Unforgettable scenes. At moments he looked like a proper “stuffed turkey” raised on an authentic German country farm. Costume changes are a given for Rammstein. The whole crew. Walking around in masks, fireproof suits. Keyboardist Flake (with a Kraftwerk-style haircut) running or power-walking along a conveyor belt, staged scraps between Lindeman and Flake.
Rammstein, who in Zagreb played almost their entire new album “Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da” except for two songs, kept upping the intensity in the second part of the show and tightening the atmospheric grip, all the way to Pussy, which delivered the peak of the regular part of the concert. Du Hast had already roped the crowd, thoroughly baked by the fiery tongues and drenched in sweat, into singing the chorus as one, but with Pussy people finally lost it. The close of the regular set with Pussy was topped off by an extra cannon at the foot of the stage, shaped like a male sex organ, which sprayed seething white foam over the crowd in the fan pit and, for good measure, finished by showering the floor with an impenetrable curtain of confetti.
The crowd on the floor took it all in with such intensity that during the break a representative of the local promoter came out and warned the people in the fan pit that if they didn’t step back from the safety barrier immediately, there was a strong chance the concert would be stopped and the show ended. This news was soon debunked by the techs, who were setting up an additional small drum set on the right side, as seen from the stage. The band returns, joined on stage by three musicians from Combichrist, and in Haifisch the Combichrist keyboardist gets harnessed into a boat and sent, tied to a steel cable, along the middle above the fan pit to the mixing desk and back. While the guy has fun rowing in the boat, he suddenly raises a Croatian flag in the air and sends the Arena crowd completely wild. The sign of total fiery chaos is carried on by the folk-anthem-turned-classic Ich Will. The expected Rammstein classic still didn’t mark the end of the show, though. The guys return and in Engel stage the final incineration of the Arena. Lindeman put on giant golden wings, with pyrotechnic tubes mounted on their tips that mercilessly spewed toxic flame across the stage.
There was honestly not a soul in the hall that such a violent Rammstein storm would leave indifferent. The sextet, which took up the iconography defined by Laibach and many axioms of the Slovenian band that defined the industrial genre, could not and was not allowed to slip up on anything this time. In their spectacular shows, Rammstein have pushed things to the extreme. People have gotten spoiled in a way, and the moment Rammstein started offering less on stage for the same price, they’d become a target for criticism. And believe me, that did not happen in Zagreb.
The Rammstein machine ground on flawlessly. The sound was excellent, with Lindeman (on the floor) fleetingly buried under a massive wall of sound created by the riffing guitars and the counterweight cannon-fire rhythms, caught in the total spirit of many hammers pounding on anvils. The ambience, surrounded by masses of iron and sheet metal, thus gained in its gloomy yet mocking character. The sextet played brilliantly and managed to make sure that all the gear behind the one-of-a-kind stage spectacle didn’t take priority over the physical delivery of the Rammstein material. So credibility was fully preserved. By now you’ve also got your answer: the high ticket price is entirely justified for what a Rammstein concert offers in 2010. Warm, hot, Rammstein!
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
COMBICHRIST: 1. All Pain Is Gone 2. Scarred 3. Get Your Body Beat 4. Fuck That Shit 5. Blut Royale 6. What The Fuck Is Wrong With You? RAMMSTEIN: 1. Rammlied 2. B******** 3. Waidmann’s Heil 4. Keine Lust 5. Weisses Fleisch 6. Feuer Frei! 7. Wiener Blut 8. Frühling in Paris 9. Ich tu dir weh 10. Liebe ist für Alle da 11. Benzin 12. Links 2 3 4 13. Du Hast 14. Pussy —encore I.— 15. Sonne 16. Haifisch 17. Ich Will —encore II.—- 18. Engel
Photo gallery
