Rammstein blazed at Gillette Stadium – 9/9
The German industrial metal heavyweights brought their pyro spectacular to a concert-season-closing Friday night in Foxborough.
How many rock tours come with a stat sheet?
The press release for Rammstein’s summer stadium tour was as much technical facts and figures as talk of the music, boasting a 4-day stage buildout, 550-plus pyrotechnic effects, 600-degree temperatures and 65-foot blasts of flame at every stop. That, to fall back on a cliché, is not something you see every day.
Pioneering figures in the Neue Deutsche Härte movement (that’s New German Hardness, a cooler subgenre name than most anything the U.S. has ever come up with), Rammstein have carved out a larger-than-life name for themselves over the past three decades. If you can name a single fact about the band, it’s probably a somewhat outrageous one, from their XXX music video exploits to the aforementioned pyrotechnic fixation or the infamous late 90s arrest of singer Till Lindemann and keyboardist Christian Lorenz on public indecency charges, stemming from on-stage antics in our very own Worcester. They make music, too; driving, weirdly catchy slices of electro-tinged mechanized punishment that you can’t help bobbing your head to.
Their latest LP, Zeit, is a commercial smash across Europe, and has finally given the band occasion to bring their full-scale live show across the Atlantic, too. They’ve been contained to arenas on past North American runs, but the stadiums of this year’s trek (also including Soldier Field and East Rutherford’s MetLife) are really where Rammstein belong. Their stage is a towering steampunk castle lined with light panels and flame chutes that looks incredible even when it’s not on fire; it’s the kind of thing you just can’t pull off indoors.
And really, everything about the Rammstein live experience is outsized. The action onstage included, but was not limited to: a giant carriage evoking Rosemary’s Baby-esque horrors (before bursting into flame), a giant phallic confetti canon, flamethrower guitars, a rafting trip for the whole band over the general admission crowd in between the main and satellite stages, and the jetpack of flames in peacock plumage formation on certified pyrotechnician Lindemann’s back (that you see at the top of the post). Plus your standard aerial blasts of flames, sparks and fireworks, of course.
Even during the songs that didn’t feature a showstopping visual component (there were a few of them during the two-hour set), the band’s sonic might did plenty of heavy lifting. The actual sound quality of shows in the concrete and plastic confines of a given football stadium can be hit-or-miss, and even at its best tends to sacrifice the subtleties of a mix, but Rammstein don’t play subtle music. The charge of their songs, particularly in the militaristic stomp of drummer Christoph Schneider’s percussion and the grinding riffage of guitarists Richard Kruspe and Paul Landers, rang loud and clear. It might’ve been the first time I’ve ever heard music sound like it’s supposed to be played at deafening volume through a stadium system.
By the end of the night (which we photographers observed atop the B stage, a safe distance from the “feuerzone” up front where the most dedicated fans really felt the heat), it was hard to imagine ever seeing Rammstein in a context that constrained their fiery vision. This was a band fully committed to bringing something unique and genuinely kind of shocking to their audience, and a tour of rare scale and ambition. I’d go on, but the images probably say it better than I can.
