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Q Magazine – Amsterdam review

Heineken Music-Halle, Amsterdam 3-Dec-01
Q Magazine – January 2002

Meet Germany’s premier flame-jizzing extremo-metal nutters.

They like beer in Holland. The floor of the Heineken Music-Hall is awash with lager, and so are the audience, red-faced and rat-arsed every single one of them. At many gigs, beer is thrown from the balcony; at this gig, beer is thrown back at the balcony.

The highly fuelled crowd are here to see Rammstein the world’s first multi-million selling techno-influenced East Berlin metal band. Rammstein sing in German, write emotive lyrics about hearts and desire (interspersed with pervy ones about “doing it”) and set them to fantastically brutal music. At their poppiest, they’re like Erasure in a very bad mood indeed, but at their rockiest they are something like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath fighting each other in giant flying stone heads.

Rammstein are named after an air show crash disaster (well, it’s better than being called Travis). They hit controversy on the metal scene (the same scene that routinely ignores Kiss’s SS letters and AC/DC’s lightning flash, and, well, Lemmy) for sampling Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi movie Triumph of the Will.

Now, as the crowd hand over beer tokens decorated with the logos of Muse, Air and The Deftones, Rammstein take the stage.

Imposing and shiny in fireproof overalls, they look like a gang of Keith Flint’s made to work in a 12 monkeys factory. Singer Till Lindemann is a scary giant, while keyboard player Flake Lorenz looks like a mad professor gone haywire on diet pills.

They begin the set with Mein Herz Brennt (My heart Burns), the first song on their recent superb, third studio album, Mutter (Mother). Aptly, flames are prevalent. Lindemann’s arm is on fire within seconds, as guitars map out a version of Kashmir as played by giant Frankie goes to Hollywood robots. Huge discs are lowered and giant sparklers fire downwards at the band. This is Guy Fawkes metal at it’s most terrifying; at times, the guitarists and Lindemann shoot fire from elongated facemasks like burning tapirs, fireworks go off at random, and Lindemann comes onstage actually on fire. It’s an incredibly exciting show that loud bang-fearing dogs will never see.

The songs themselves stomp along mightily. There’s the emotive Mutter, which features an immaculate pomp rock solo. And then there’s Links 2 3 4 (Left 2 3 4). The title refers to both marching and being left wing; Rammstein’s reply to the Nazism critics, its chorus is roughly, “They want my heart to be on the right, but when I look down it beats on the left”. Live the song erupts like unattended lava and seems, oddly, to have added “HEIL!” chorus.

The show climaxes as it were, with the superb Bück Dich (Bend Down) in which Lorenz does bend over in front of Lindemann showing some razor-like buttocks, and Lindemann stands over him, waving a large fake penis which spurts water all over the place. It’s spectacularly rude and stupid, and does suggest that Rammstein are not about to annex Austria. This is confirmed when, as an encore, Lorenz leaves his keyboards to surf the crowd. In a dinghy.

After the show, the air acrid with the smell of gunpowder and dope, it is time to talk with monastically tonsured guitarist Paul Landers and splendidly-named drummer Christoph Doom Schneider, the chatty Rammsteiners. Influenced by AC/DC, Ministry and German rocker Udo Lindenberg, Rammstein’s members were part of the underground punk scene in East Berlin and evolved their music slowly in isolation. Rammstein are contrary types. “We said, if every metal band has long hair, let’s cut our hair. If every metal band has short trousers, we will have long ones,” says Landers, who memorably describes Rammstein’s sound as “monotonic stupid music with very clean corners”.

Links 2 3 4 is mentioned and Schneider says, thoughtfully, “We are not a right-wing band. We’ve always said that. We make music that sounds dangerous and military-like, and the lyrics are completely opposite.”

Landers says, “We don’t try to make things too easy. It’s our job; people have to think.” It’s time to go. Landers grabs a handful of Gummi Bears sweets from a bag and says goodbye. Schneider smiles. “We think it’s fun to have a German band in the world,” he says. “Even Germans can have funny bands!”

David Quantick.

© 2005 Sue Lindemann