Author: Primož Novak
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Graz / Explosiv / Austria
Concert date: 14.12.2017
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: 18,00€ 20,00€
Panzerballett sounds odd already as a band name. The music is undoubtedly even odder. Since 2005 the band has been putting out albums that can roughly be labeled jazz metal, but there’s a lot more going on under the surface. To avoid overcomplicating things with academic interpretations, you can simply say that Panzerballett count as pretty extreme music. Jan Zehrfeld, the band’s founder, who spent some time in the German jazz outfit Passport, cites Tribal Tech, Planet X, Meshuggah, Dillinger Escape Plan, Allan Holdsworth and others as influences. Associations with Frank Zappa pop up fast, too. Not just because they recorded a »Zappa medley« on one album, but also because of the way they mix genres. Overall, this is a band with no limits, as they’ve shown throughout their career with off-the-wall covers of Abba, Rammstein, AC/DC and more.
Zehrfeld and the crew never run out of off-the-wall covers. This year they surprised everyone with a Christmas album, X-Mas Death Jazz, on which they reworked some well-known Christmas tunes. Naturally, Panzerballett did it in their own original and unique way. So if a song is famous for its pleasant melody, Panzerballett went at it with their signature dissonance and made the whole thing properly complex with jazzy rhythms. Suddenly those cozy Christmas songs became a pain to listen to and not the least bit singable!
Panzerballett decided to present the new Christmas album on a short European tour as well. The band doesn’t stop near Slovenia very often, but this time they made an exception and landed in Graz, where they played an exclusive set. Since this is an extreme band that complicates things instead of playing anything conventional, the turnout was predictably dismal. Only a handful of people showed up at the Explosiv club, the kind who swear by progressive and technical metal bands. And even among prog fans, Panzerballett can be a bit out of context.
Panzerballett work as a quintet, but this time they were joined by a third guitarist, Rafael Trujillo, who otherwise plays in the German progressive death metal band Obscura. The band’s drummer, Sebastian Lanser, plays there too. So these are musicians who work across different genres, which undoubtedly comes in handy for Panzerballett. With their takes on Christmas songs like White Christmas, Little Drummer Boy, For Whom the Jingle Bells Toll and Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the band quickly made it clear that these are extremely well-schooled musicians with years and years of training behind them. The songs sounded complex: all that was left of the originals was the familiar melody, and everything else was built on broken-up rhythms, atonality and heavy distortion. Trujillo helped make it possible for the guitarists to play in three-part harmonies, and on top of that there was an excellent saxophone that pushed this controlled chaos to its peak. The sax player and the bassist leaned on sheet music too, but on their solo spots they just played their parts off the top of their heads. Even with every member standing out, the whole thing worked as one entity. Zehrfeld may be the band’s leader, but on stage it never seemed like he wanted to put only himself in the spotlight. To spice up the show, and to explain things, Zehrfeld talked about a song and how he’d approached it to make it extra special. To make a pleasant Christmas ditty sound even more morbid and unusual, Jan Zehrfeld picked up an eight-string guitar. The low end came to the front, and Last Christmas sounded wicked and brutal. There was practically not a single song where you could predict anything.
After the Christmas set, the band came back to play one more song. They played Zehrfunk from the first album, where every member surprised with a spotlight moment of their own, and those moments built the song brilliantly and gave it an incredible flow. Despite the pretty complex racket, Panzerballett are an easy band to listen to, one that surprises with comic interludes too. With their quirkiness, Panzerballett may really not be right for bigger crowds. This Christmas-flavored show was without a doubt a real treat for fans of complex, unconventional music. Definitely a gig that sticks in your memory.
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