Now Watching: Rammstein @ Rock Am Ring, 2010 (DVD Review)

A review of Rammstein’s set at Germany’s Rock Am Ring festival in 2010, which I’ve been watching a lot of recently…

The nuts and bolts of Rammstein’s music are exactly what you might expect from a self-professed ‘dance-metal’ band - violent onslaughts of explosive drums and guitars like monster trucks roaring into action, only resisting anchorage to the depths of complete impenetrability through the occasional thunderbolt-like injection of synthesisers.

But witnessing them as a live band prompted a few surprising observations, the first of which being that despite my usual objections to music as outwardly leaden as that of Rammstein, I enjoyed watching the gig immensely.

The second is the band members’ abilities as engaging live performers, particularly lead singer Till Lindemann. Built like a rhinoceros he dominates the stage as such, and yet still manages to retain a certain magnetic quality that keeps the audience transfixed for the entirety of their set.

The third observation (an unavoidable one, it could be argued) was the ambitiousness of the pyrotechnics and special effects during the gig, most of which took nerves of steel even to watch; at one point Lindemann actually had what must have been some sort of lightbulb in his mouth, again leaving the audience gazing up at him in awe as if he was a skyscraper.

Returning to the music, if you’re not a fan of this genre or have not heard the songs before, they do potentially run of the risk of merging into one dense, concrete wall of noise (with the exception of ‘Sonne’, perhaps, with its unmistakable counting refrain).

But given a chance, any music fan watching this gig can surely begin to appreciate that Rammstein are a highly entertaining live act, and are more than capable of bridging that treacherous gap between ‘dance’ and ‘metal’.

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Photo credit to Discogs