Rammstein in Ljubljana – When Till Opens the Valve… (2013)

Poba Last updated 29 May 2019

Location: Ljubljana / Arena Stožice / Slovenia
Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2013

“Wir halten das Tempo” is the title of the new tour by German industrial Conans Rammstein! They’re selling like hotcakes. Shows are pretty much sold out in advance across the board. Since their sixth album “Liebe Ist Für Alle Da” (2009), Rammstein have been on an exponential rise. They think like businessmen, so they know now is the time to rake in piles of cash over the course of their career. That’s why they’re on the road nonstop. Hence also the telling title of the current tour, “Let’s Keep the Beat!”, which brought them back to Ljubljana after eight years.

Anyone who remembers Rammstein’s 2005 visit to Hala Tivoli can tell you how much their stage production has been catapulted upward in recent years. Today Rammstein are a world-class musical name, one of the handful of the “best-selling” acts. They’re a machine that has deliberately subordinated every force to marketing its own brand. And at that, it’s more than obvious, they’ve succeeded big time.

Rammstein, in the lineup of Till Lindemann (vocals), Richard Z. Kruspe (lead guitar, backing vocals), Pail H. Landers (rhythm guitar, backing vocals), Christian “Flake” Lorenz (keyboards, samples, synthesizers), Oliver Riedel (bass guitar) and Christoph Schneider (drums, electronic percussion, percussion), set off a real “mini migration of peoples” with their announced Ljubljana visit. Hordes in black! All heading for Stožice. From every corner and every direction. The pubs around Bežigrad and Stožice were full of the “thirsty.” Even the owner of a Bosnian restaurant in Sofra grumbled that he had to stretch his working day into time he’d already booked off for vacation. All for the money! Everyone for the money! Slovenians, Austrians, Hungarians, Croats,….

It’s 11 minutes past nine in the evening. The arena goes dark, the crowd’s in the air! Just as expected. Rammstein serve up little, but worked out down to the last detail into a top-notch stage attraction! German perfection. So the curtain drops during the opener Ich Tu Dir Weh. The newly (again) “blond” Lindemann is lowered on a stand from the ceiling toward the stage floor. A song tailor-made for the opening slot! Its anthemic chant is hypnotically contagious, the hall falls into one single delirium, and the marching beat underpinned by the echo of factory lathes, as an important part of the band’s stature and voice, kept generating that unique Rammstein-show vibration throughout the night! All eyes were mostly on “pyromaniac” Lindemann, who handled a whole plethora of staged stage excesses, with big help from the “puppy,” aka keyboardist Flake. The latter really doesn’t have much to do during a show, so for quite a while now his job has been that of guinea pig, who might also end up cooked in a pot. The peak of his surrender to Rammmtein rituals this time wasn’t crowd-surfing on the audience’s hands in a rubber dinghy. It was brought by Bück dich. Here Flake “spun around, lost and wandering” on all fours, chained to a dog leash, which the (in every respect) dominant Lindemann of course handled with skill. In the song’s big finale the two were lifted by an elevator high above the stage and played out a short male-on-male fling. No two ways about it. Provocation and a half, feeding the rabble hungry for bread and circuses. Money buys everything. Every provocation, every human dignity, however well guarded, every individual will, however firm and seemingly unbending. No point moralizing any further. We know how far we’ve driven the planet thanks to the fragility of the mind and its powerlessness to resist material (not necessarily) goods.

Lindemann cashed in on his official “pyromaniac” license big time. If Agropop’s Franček Piromanček burns down farmsteads, Rammstein’s Till would rather open the valve and blast the Stožice hall to dust! In Du riechst so gut he showered the hall with sparks from a fiery arc, there was also the famous Rammstein ode to fossil fuels (Benzin), with more fire eruptions,…. and then there’s that giant “white foam” mixer, with which Lindemann in the concert’s big finale generously sprays and douses the overheated heads of the fan pit, as the performance of Pussy, the single from “Liebe ist für alle da,” wraps up the spectacle.

It’s hard to judge the sound when they seat you somewhere up in the rafters of the hall, right under the ceiling. Sonically, though, things worked just fine. For those of you behind on the news, let me hint that the echo in the hall is gone. After the fiasco of Sting’s concert in 2011, they finally fixed that flaw. So why aren’t there more concerts in the hall? The answer no longer lies in the structure being partly unusable; most likely it’s about money again. The hall rental fee must be unimaginably, outrageously high. There’s hardly any other explanation for the hall going so underused.

The combination of powerful spotlight beams and the stage construction itself, whose backdrops offered a view of the inside of the Jesenice steelworks, fits Rammstein’s musical legacy like a glove in every component. Utterly banal but therefore all the more direct, highly penetrating riffs, backed by cannon-miked rhythms of a deadly underground marching beat, plus the instantly recognizable vocals of the band’s frontman, the charismatically derailed commander Till Lindemann, who had the crowd eating out of his hand, steamrolled the hall with feather-light ease! Lindemann’s vocal lines, really piercing addresses delivered in hard-edged German, are maximally effected. In clipped, coarsely rabble-rousing shouts, through endless repetition of a motif, they build a state of atmospheric rapaciousness that leads you into a phase of mental trance. You can’t escape the clutches of the Rammstein spectacle and the grinding of that gigantic machine. With Rammstein everything is so robust, so rough, so exaggerated in its coarseness,…. When their show comes to life on stage, it feels as if a giant steel troll had risen from the ashes, crushing everything in front of and beneath it. With even the most filigree-measured movement it sweeps every last ant off the face of the planet. Rammstein don’t know the word sophisticated. And when they do try handling it, it doesn’t suit their stature at all. We saw that in the encore with Mein Hertz brennt, in a ballad arrangement played only by Till and Flake (on piano). By no means a wrong move performance-wise, but one that stirred a burning wish in the heart for the rest of the band to jump on stage quick and smash out the “normal” version of this Rammstein standard.

The banality of the band’s own musical legacy is offset by the development of giant stage-production scenery, a plethora of excessive, well-acted theatrical stage sketches that don’t let the audience breathe for even a fraction of a second. Every second, every fraction of a minute in an hour and three quarters, carries its own sealed-in function during this huge stage spectacle. A gigantic structure that, in all that scenery intensified with fire effects, has to guarantee full safety.

How do you present an utterly banal musical language in the most attractive way possible? Rammstein know how, and they understand that philosophy down to the last detail. Many times during the show my mind drifted to Laibach. It wasn’t hard to conclude that, really, the Slovenian pioneers of industrial should be standing where Rammstein stand today. But the piles of cash went to Rammstein instead of Laibach. That’s how the world turns!

You can’t nitpick a concert spectacle that seemingly came off perfectly. Rammstrein got the thing done by the routine schedule. Professionally, even if, on the back of their acquired power and status as one of the biggest bands in the world (in commercial terms), they grew alienated from the people coming to their shows long ago. But the same can be said – oh, what a chilling realization – for Roger Waters and his hyper-produced “The Wall Live” adventure.

Only one single fact was puzzling during the show! The floor didn’t fill up until somewhere around the middle of the concert! At first, watching the venue from the stands, you’d think they deliberately didn’t sell the floor to capacity for safety reasons. Why not everyone could be on the floor right when the show started remains a mystery, but quite likely the organizer was “pushing” the crowd into the hall through some narrow entrance bottleneck… I’m only speculating. Poor crowd. You overpay for a ticket to get a spot on the floor, then you miss 20 minutes or more of the show. Probably not through your own fault.

author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Nina Grad

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