Kraftwerk played the Wang Theatre – 10/3
Wang Center? Citi Wang Theatre? Citi Performing Arts Center? No one has any idea what downtown’s most ornate performance space is actually called anymore. It’s quite a beautiful place to see a show though, and probably the Boston area’s best-suited venue to the rare and spectacular Kraftwerk show we were lucky enough to host earlier this month.
The pioneering German electronic band tours quite sporadically, especially in North America. They’ve brought their career retrospective 3D shows stateside a few times this decade, but this was their first venture Boston in many years (if they have, in fact, ever played here before – local concert historians, fact check me on this). Having missed their 2012 MoMA shows in New York and last year’s date at the 9:30 Club in DC, I was elated to have them in town (and, naturally, to photograph them – thanks Globe).
The two-hour-plus performance didn’t disappoint in the slightest. Each audience member was handed a pair of 80s-retro 3D glasses upon entry, lending the affair a sort of campy charm that was matched by the show’s visuals. Glowing green numbers shot out toward the audience like eyeballs from heads in Friday the 13th Part 3 during opening song “Numbers,” and from there it was a tour through a combination of lo-fi computer animations and more detailed CGI creations that fully immersed the crowd in Kraftwerk’s eerie but frequently tongue-in-cheek universe. Highlights included a dashboard view of a digital drive through “Autobahn” and an encore of “The Robots” wherein the band was replaced on stage by actual robots.
The visual spectacle was a large part of the draw of course, but how good Kraftwerk’s music sounds through a booming modern system in a sizable concert hall should not be understated. Founding member Ralf Hütter and his accomplices stood behind their trademark podiums, operating what were presumably some elaborate arrays of gadgetry to bring the motorik rhythms and melodies to life. The end result was a perfectly attuned balance between man and machine, the lines between where one ended and the other began purposefully blurred. It was a massively enjoyable show, and I’m still working on ways to incorporate the glasses into my Halloween costume.
