When Till Opens the Valve… (2013)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Nina Grad

Venue: Arena Stožoce, Ljubljana
Concert date: 04/30/2013
Attendance: 15,000
Ticket price: €49.00 (floor) / €45.00 (green ring) / €39.00 (red stand) / €70.00 (fan pit) / €90.00 (boxes)

»Wir halten das Tempo« is the title of the new tour by German industrial Conans Rammstein! They’re selling like hotcakes. Shows are routinely sold out way in advance. Since their sixth album »Liebe Ist Für Alle Da« (2009), Rammstein have been on an exponential climb. They think like a business, so they know this is the moment to rake in piles of cash over the course of their career. That’s why they’re on the road nonstop. Hence the telling title of the current tour, »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 their stage production has been catapulted skyward in recent years. Today Rammstein are a world-class musical name, one of a handful of the »best-selling« acts out there. They’re a machine that has deliberately bent every force toward marketing its own brand. And in that, they’ve more than obviously succeeded.

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) and Christoph Schneider (drums, electronic percussion, percussion), set off a proper »mini migration of peoples« with their announced visit to Ljubljana. Hordes in black! All heading for Stožice. From every corner and every direction. The bars in Bežigrad and Stožice were packed with the »thirsty«. Even the owner of the Bosnian restaurant Sofra complained that he had to stretch his working hours into the days he’d already booked off for vacation. All for the money! Everybody for the money! Slovenians, Austrians, Hungarians, Croatians….

It’s 11 minutes past nine in the evening. The arena goes dark, and the crowd goes up in the air! Just as expected. Rammstein serve up little, but it’s worked out down to the last detail into a top-shelf stage attraction. German perfection. The curtain drops in the opener Ich Tu Dir Weh. Lindemann, now (again) a »blondie«, is lowered on a rig from the ceiling to the stage floor. The song is tailor-made for an opener! Its anthemic chant is hypnotically infectious, the hall falls into one single delirium, and the marching beat, underpinned by the echo of factory lathes, an important part of the band’s look and sound, keeps generating that unique Rammstein vibe throughout the show! All eyes were mostly on the »pyromaniac« Lindemann, who was in charge of a whole galaxy of staged stage excesses, with a big helping hand from the »puppy«, a.k.a. keyboardist Flake. The latter actually has little to do during the show, so for a long time now his job has been that of a guinea pig who can even get cooked in a pot. The peak of his surrender to the Rammstein rituals this time wasn’t surfing over the crowd’s hands in a rubber dinghy. It came with the song Bück dich. Flake »spun around lost and wandering« on all fours, chained to a dog leash that was expertly worked by the (in everything) dominant Lindemann. In the song’s grand finale, the two rose on a lift high above the stage and played out a short fling between a couple of »warm brothers«. Say what you will. A provocation and a half that feeds the masses, hungry for bread and circuses. Money buys everything. Every provocation, every human dignity, however well guarded, every individual will, however firm and seemingly unbending. It’s not worth moralizing any further. We know what state we’ve driven the planet to, thanks to the fragility of the mind and its powerlessness against material (not necessarily) goods.

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

It’s hard to judge the sound when you’re handed a seat somewhere in the rafters, right under the ceiling. Sonically, though, everything worked exemplarily. For those of you who are 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 are there still no more concerts in the hall? The answer no longer lies in the partial unusability of the building. Most likely, the real answer is again to be found in money-related reasons. The hall’s 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, which in the backdrop offered a view of the inside of the Jesenice steelworks, fits the musical legacy of Rammstein like a glove in every single component. Extremely banal but all the more direct, highly penetrating riffs, backed by cannon-loud rhythms of a deadly underground marching beat, and the recognizable voice of the band’s frontman, the charismatically unhinged commander Till Lindemann, with the crowd eating out of his hand, steamrolled the hall with featherweight ease! Lindemann’s vocal lines, really piercing addresses delivered in hard-sounding German, are maximally effected. In clipped, roughly inciting shouts, through the repetition of a motif over and over, they establish a state of atmospheric predatoriness that leads you into a phase of mental rapture. You can’t escape the predatory pull of the Rammstein spectacle and the grinding of the gigantic machine. With Rammstein everything is so robust, so rugged, so over the top in its crudeness,…. When their show comes alive 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 move, it sweeps every last ant off the face of the planet. Rammstein don’t know the word sophisticated. And when they do try to handle it, it doesn’t suit them one bit. That’s how we got Mein Hertz brennt in the encore, in a ballad arrangement performed only by Till and Flake (on piano). Not a wrong move at all in terms of performance, but one that stirred up a burning desire in the heart for the rest of the band to jump back on stage and smash out the »normal« version of this Rammstein standard.

The banality of the band’s original music is compensated for by the development of the scenery of a giant stage production, a whole galaxy of 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 function in this raucous stage spectacle. A gigantic structure that, amid all this scenery intensified by pyro inserts, has to guarantee complete safety.

How do you present an utterly banal musical language as attractively as possible? Rammstein know how, and they understand that philosophy down to the last detail. More than once during the show, Laibach came to mind. It wasn’t hard to conclude that the Slovenian pioneers of industrial should really be standing where Rammstein stand today. But the piles of money went to Rammstein instead of Laibach. That’s how the world turns!

There’s no point nitpicking a concert spectacle that seemingly succeeded perfectly. Rammstrein got the job done on a routine schedule. Professionally, even though, on the back of the power and status they’ve gained as one of the biggest bands in the world (in the commercial sense), they drifted away from their concertgoers long ago. And the same, oh how chilling the realization, can be said of Roger Waters and his hyper-produced »The Wall Live« adventure.

Only one single fact was baffling during the show! The floor didn’t fill up until somewhere around the middle of the concert! Watching the scene from the stands, you might at first think they deliberately don’t sell the floor to full capacity for safety reasons. Why not all the concertgoers could be on the floor right at showtime remains a mystery, but quite likely the organizer was »pushing« the crowd into the hall through some narrow entrance bottleneck… I’m saying allegedly. Poor crowd. You overpay for a ticket to get your spot on the floor, and then you miss 20 minutes or more of the show. Probably not through your own fault.