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Here is the band
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First,let me tell you about the band.From left to right you have,Richard Krupse(guitarist),Flake Lorenz(keyboardist),Paul Landers(guitarist),Till Lindemann(vocals),Oliver Reidal(basist),and Christopher Schneider(drums)
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Here is how they got started
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Here is the info about the band.
In the beginning there was terror. Metal and techno in an unashamedly seductive mix, from Germany at that and in a provocative, aesthetically ambivalent form. Lyricism with a sledge-hammer, with a dash of black Romanticism, sexuality, desire and mania. Muscular, shining male bodies, unfeigned.
It was a satisfactory success, over eighteen months. In the charts several times and then the breakthrough and up to number 8 in the album charts. The stuff bands dream of. That was Rammstein's debut, "Herzeleid", a delayed-action sensation, a success story without parallel.
Along the way there was David Lynch, there was "Lost Highway", and two songs on the brilliant soundtrack alongside Bowie's "I'm Deranged". Admiration from the film team for the Teutons, and key moments in the film supported by Rammstein's horror Romanticism. Perhaps, muses one of the prison warders in "Lost Highway" the whole thing is "weird shit". Whatever the case, no-one understands it. But is there any need? The attraction of Lynch's puzzles, as with the no less enigmatic audio attacks by Rammstein, is the lure of the sinister, the eroticism of myth, the power of force. It is a popular misunderstanding to confuse the artist with the art, the operators with the inventors, imagination with fact.
However, Rammstein is a subject not just for the music press, but more recently for the glossies and city magazines. First there was a great shaking of heads, then people were at a loss or mildly amused. What is it about this ensemble from East Berlin and Schwerin? A youth phenomenon? Enjoyment of sadomasochism? A new lust for the obscurantist? The sound of social degeneration? The beat of crisis?
It's not unlikely that the depression of the closing years of this century, the lack of clarity and hopelessness of the post-industrial final days is the vehicle for such utterances. But Rammstein are no dull multipliers of collective disquiet and they do not invoke a moronic will to destroy. The playful side of the Rammstein world - which reminds "stern" magazine irresistibly of Hollywood, although David Lynch has no access there (and no longer desires it) - is quite simply ignored; smarter analysts at least recognize the "comic-strip" side of the scenario. And it's true: we're not in a philosophy seminar here. Though there would certainly be something to discuss.
Especially now that the second album has been released. "Sehnsucht" (longing) is, quite simply, a big word for feelings which are linked beyond homesickness with sinews and addicition. "I want to ride your tears/ Over your chin to Africa/ And search between your thighs / For last year's snow." Which is no longer there, of course. You just can't help yourself: it may be laughable, but you haven't laughed this much in a long time. Almost frightening, the way Till Lindemann creates his verbal images ( and where he finds them!), how he lets the lyrics hang in the air, always with a second tier at the ready, a cunning double entendre, dark innuendo, a nasty half sentence. As when, in "Bestrafe mich" (punish me) and "B�ck Dich" (bend down), sadomasochism suddenly becomes a musically negotiable matter, of stimulating foolishness which practising experts are always reporting on!
The shudder of delight: always a black comedy, the entrance to the hell of fun. These songs are threatening and bombastic, if we may call them so - the way the synthetic strings flit about, piercing and weird, the way even in the single "Engel" (angel the most gorgeous kitsch is executed and the way Till Lindemann unexpectedly sings like a pampered minnesinger, when he normally growls. The idyll is believable. But in the chorus, even the music is not quite right. And now listen: "I poured her blood into the fire of my rage". After that the song makes a dive fo the abyss and the genre images are repeated as horror tableaux. An almost classical street ballad in which the perpetrator and the victim change places at the end: now the listener is sitting at the piano himself and he begins to play.
Playing on the keyboard of our angst and obsession, in fact. When in future we want to reflect on Rammstein, the archetypal ought to be more closely examined than the phenotypical. Beneath the surface of a perfect show and tantalising rave-up bubbles the fire of passion. Rammstein is sawing at the abyss.
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