POP MUSIC Monday, April 26, 2004; Page C05 Washington Post
Einsturzende Neubauten
Amantra on the back of a 1983 Einsturzende Neubauten album read "Listen with pain -- Hear with pain -- Ears are wounds," but the German outfit, which played for a near-capacity crowd at the 9:30 club Friday, has given up using jackhammers and welding torches on concert stages. Instead, its engrossing, two-hour-plus performance was dominated by clattering grooves and blissful moments of sheer musicality.
Of course for a band whose stage setup includes chunks of ductwork, piles of metal and plastic pipes, air compressors, springs and sundry industrial containers -- singer Blixa Bargeld mentioned a pre-show trip to Home Depot -- musicality is a relative term. Therefore, if the Einsturzende Neubauten of the 1980s was the sound of a collapsing city (the band's name means "collapsing new buildings"), Friday's show -- the first of a three-week North American tour -- was the sound of the wind whistling through the ruins.
Highlights of the set, heavy on tracks from its excellent new album, "Perpetuum Mobile," included "Youme & Meyou" and "Ich gehe Jetzt," which came across as industrial-baroque, with Bargeld's chanting vocals (almost exclusively in German) fronting a parade whose beats were siphoned from machinery clangor.
Bassist Alexander Hacke tethered "Selbstportrait mit Kater" to a hard-rock orbit, while founding member N.U. Unruh (a k a Andrew Churdy) provided visual as well as sonic entertainment, banging every available metal object and crashing a string of empty gas cans across the stage. And if the audience was saddened to see it end sometime after 1 a.m. and five encores -- including a charging "Alles" -- they could relive the whole thing with a two-CD set of the show, for sale ($35) just minutes after its conclusion.
-- Patrick Foster
