Wave Gotik Treffen

Day 3 - bands in order of appearance:

Endless
Indica
The Crystelles
The LoveCrave
Big Boy
Faith And The Muse
Diary Of Dreams
Lacrimosa
Alien Sex Fiend

Agra, Leipzig
Saturday May 22 2010

Today, we're up the Agra. All day. Although there are other bands, in other venues around town that I'd like to see, the space-time logistics don't really work out. Until teleportation becomes widely available, this is the perennial WGT problem: it's often not possible to get around to all the bands in all the locations that ideally you'd like to. So, today we'll cut our losses to some extent and stick around at the Agra, and let the bands come to us.

What was I saying yesterday, about giving the conventions of rock music a chance to show us what they can do? Well, our first band today, Endless, are certainly all about the conventions of rock music. Apparently, they're an old band that has reunited for this show, but as I've never heard of them before I'll have to take the WGT programmbuch's word for that. The reason I haven't heard of the band before probably has something to do with the fact that I don't take much notice of straightforward, meat-and-potatoes rock music - their cover of Bowie's 'Five Years' stands out as a real song, with structure, tension, resolution, all that stuff, in a set that's otherwise largely forgettable boilerplate rockin'. Can't say I'm impressed with Endless. Fortunately, their set isn't.Indica look all exotic and winsome and faery in their publicity photos, but in real life they're a cheery bunch of rock chicks, like a smiley version of The Runaways. They seem so pleased to be here - the guitarist just can't stop grinning delightedly - that it's quite endearing. I'm sufficiently swayed by the band's upbeat demeanour to find myself rather liking them. C'mon, sometimes it's nice to have a change from scowling rock god angst.

Indica are, apparently, stars in their home country of Finland, and it's not difficult to see why. Their music is accessible pop-rock with just a touch of folkie-hippiness - that'll be the winsome faery side of things coming in to play, then. It's not, frankly, the sort of stuff I'll be rushing out to buy, but their set passes pleasantly enough. If a kind of girl-next-door take on Kate Bush's suburban mysticism ever takes off, Indica will be the cheerfully smiling stars of the scene.

Gitane Demone is generally regarded as an all-purpose deathrock heroine, but I wonder what the deathrockers make of her side project, The Crystelles. A handful of curious deathrock types have filtered in to the Agra to see the band perform, but the mohawk massive that packed the Felsenkeller the other day hasn't really shown up in numbers. Maybe that's because The Crystelles don't follow the modern-day deathrock rule book: they don't play ramalama punker songs with an air of comic melodrama. Mind you, the band seem to be on some sort of ghoul-like tip. They're all whited-out, in bandages and shrouds, as if they've just been performing voodoo ceremonies out the back.

'We're doing some sort of swampy thing,' announces Gitane Demone, adding gnomically, 'It's very relateable.' Well, I don't know about that (I don't even know what it means), but, yes, there's a touch of bayou blues in the band's sound, mixed with a certain splash of sixties girl-group pop dramatics that keeps it all nimble and immediate, even as the ooze squelches up. Gitane herself seems amiably scatty, apparently making up the set list as she goes along. Her between-song anacdotes and asides provide an amusing counterpoint to her just-risen-from-the-grave appearance. As a matter of fact, if it wasn't for the ghoul school get-up, The Crystelles might give Jack White - himself no slouch at matching a swamp-blues sound to accessible immediacy - a run for his money. As it is, the visuals do rather lock the band in the goth box, but I guess Gitane's down with that.Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to rock. And here come The LoveCrave to help us do it. The LoveCrave are just as straightforward as Endless, really - they aren't about pushing the rock 'n' roll envelope; there is no experimentation or out-there-ness about their sound. They just ROCK. Fortunately, they've got the dynamics and the presence and a certain touch of showbiz pizzazz to make it all work. They have a guitarist who's all about the showboating and the powerchords (he can even make metal fingers without the slightest hint of irony) and a singer who clearly lives for those moments on stage when she can rock it up amid the roaring thunder of her band. She's got a big voice and a Jane Fonda headband, and sometimes, folks, that's all you need.

Does anyone need Big Boy, though? Apparently, Big Boy is a man, not a band. You see that man, there, in T-shirt and jeans, looking like a roadie but behaving like a rock star? See him strutting about the stage like a slightly camp monarch trying to decide who's next to get their head chopped off? That's him.

And that's what Big Boy does - he struts, in an exaggerately arrogant manner that might be a knowing, humourous pastiche. Or maybe he means it, maan. While he struts, he rasps out a gutteral vocal. His band of fresh-faced rawk guys pile up the riffage. I suppose it's meant to sound like pretty tough stuff, but in fact Big Boy and his chums come across like a bunch of Marilyn Manson fans trying to do a Rammstein thing - but with Mazza's theatrics and spooky glamour replaced by workaday rock-band posturing, and none of Rammstein's implacable power.

The soundmix is terrible - whoever's on the desk seems to have shoved everything up into the distortion zone - but I don't think a mix of the greatest finesse and subtlety could make Big Boy's tiresome riff, shout, riff, shout schtick sound any less gormless and lunkheaded than it does. Usually, when a band I don't like comes on, my avoidance option is to go to the bar. In this case, I think I'll go all the way to the toilet.From the ridiculous to the sublime. Here come Faith And The Muse, mob-handed, bristling with string-sections and percussionists. The current F&TM show involves anything up to nine people. Even here, on the comparatively large stage of the Agra, the four-way multitasking bass/guitar/cello/violin duo of Marcia Rangel and Steven James ends up squashed into the south-west corner. In physics, matter expands to fill the space available. In rock 'n' roll, so do Faith And The Muse.

The show unfurls. The Butoh dancers perform their slo-mo whirligig. Monica Richards steps up to the front and tweaks aside the virtual curtain. Faith And The Muse, more than most bands, and certainly more than any band we've seen today, create their own world. They're not in the business of churning out mere rock - although, when the guitars crank up, they certainly can rock. Their performance is a spectacle of colour and theatre, dynamics and invention. Sandwiched as they are between one-idea rock bands, the sheer sweep of Faith And The Muse's creative scope is all the more impressive.

Curiously, perhaps, given that Monica is so much the focal point of the band, it's the songs on which William Faith takes a vocal role that stand out on this occasion. 'Sovereign' is a hurtling freight train, an object lesson in how to do this rock thing without descending into mere bludgeon riffola. 'Nine Dragons' is all percussion-thunder and scary hollering, but even at its tumultuous height there's still space for Paul Mercer's violin to glide among the rampant beats with understated insouciance. Amid the rampage, there is subtlety. And amid today's monochrome rock bands, Faith And The Muse are a splash of colour, like a cockatoo in a flock of noisy starlings.

Every time I see Adrian Hates of Diary Of Dreams - which, I'll grant you, isn't often - he looks more like a rock star. These days he's aquired a leonine mane of rock star hair, which he deploys to great effect as his band rolls out its sturm und drang. Yes, we're back in the rock zone again, and although Diary Of Dreams are generally regarded as an electronic band (er, aren't they? Well, they are around here) they're giving us the full-on rock production tonight.

Adrian Hates grandstands like an authentic rock god - and receives the authentic rock god welcome from the crowd, which seems to have instantly converted itself into the Diary Of Dreams fan club. Meaty guitars churn in the mix, smoke and lasers fill the stage. Torben Wendt, old school Diary Of Dreams co-vocalist, now frontman of synthpoppers Diorama, returns to his old role on 'The Curse' - an oddly lightweight electro-ditty, incongruous among the heavy-duty rockers that surround it. But the two-pronged vocal attack (to use the traditional expression) gives the song a heft and a drive that's entirely effective, and it certainly goads the crowd to greater heights. As the song ends to storms of applause, someone in the crowd actually gives vent to an authentic Beatlemania scream.

Like many of the bigger bands at the WGT, Diary Of Dreams' success is somewhat relative. They're relatively unknown outside Germany, outside the goth scene - but, within it, they're conquering heroes, no doubt about that. Only one question remains. Who's going to tell Adrian Hates he looks like David Coverdale out of Whitesnake?Now that we're talking of hairstyles, I bring great news. The mullet is not dead! It's alive, well, and living in eighties-tastic splendour upon the head of Tilo Wolff, the retro-coiffed main man of Lacrimosa.

Here's another band that is almost entirely obscure outside goth circles, and yet within the German scene, they're megastars. Lacrimosa's music - sonorous, grandiloquent metal, weighty with portent, creaking under the burden of its own solemnity - is heavy going in more ways than one. But Tilo Wolff himself is something of a goth scene pin-up. This rather odd mismatch means that a Lacrimosa performance is a bit like watching Black Sabbath fronted by Nik Kershaw.

I find myself having to suspend disbelief as the show begins - with a posse of scantily-dressed girls waving Lacrimosa flags, an indication that for all his serious muso stance, Tilo Wolff isn't averse to a slice or two of shameless cheese. Then the musicians appear, and the weighty portents descend on us with a hefty thunk. Guitars roar like the fires inside Mount Doom, while Tilo Wolf enunciates his lyrics with dramatic gravitas, as if predicting the end of the world. As he sings, he makes odd little grabbing motions with his fingers, as if trying to snatch gnats out of mid-air. At first I assume this is just a bit of by-play to illustrate some point he's making in one song, but when he keeps on doing it on song after song he ends up looking like a man in the grip of a bizarre nervous twitch. Either that, or the midges are bothering him. There's never a roadie around with some fly spray when you need it, is there?

On keyboards, Anne Nurmi, once of Two Witches, now the female half of Lacrimosa (how's that for going from the third division to the Premiership?) gets her own spotlight, but the show belongs to Tilo. Frankly, he's welcome to keep it, if you ask me, but I'm the odd man out in the Agra. The crowd worships Lacrimosa's every last crashing powerchord. The only slight piece of light relief for my long-suffering punk rock head comes with 'Stolzes Herz', a veritable rifferama rock opera so gloriously, ludicrously OTT it could've been written by Monty Python. It's hard not to crack a disbelieving grin over this one, although nobody on stage is playing it for laughs. Something tells me that 'self' and 'parody' are not words in Tilo Wolff's dictionary.

And now, from the sublime (as some might see it) to the ridiculous (as they might knowingly characterise themselves). Alien Sex Fiend top things off tonight, and in a way it's a surprise to see them here.

It's not something to which the band like to draw much attention these days, but there was a time, back in the 90s, when Alien Sex Fiend attempted to distance themselves from the goth scene and reinvent the band as some sort of novelty trance-techno outfit, even to the point of refusing to have goth bands as supports at their gigs.

As a strategy, this was conspicuously unsuccessful. Not only because the only audience the Fiends ever had was the goth audience, and it's axiomatic that to alienate your fanbase is to flirt with career-death. But also because, in the decades following their 80s heyday, Alien Sex Fiend didn't actually do much of anything. Years on end would pass between gigs and albums. Far from striking out on a bold new tangent, the Fiends more or less coasted to a gentle halt.

Well, Mr and Mrs Fiend must've overcome their goth-allergy now. Here at the WGT, they're surounded by the buggers, and nobody seems to have come out in a rash. Not that you could tell - Nik Fiend is caked in his customary nightmare before breakfast make-up, and costumed like the butler in a stately home of doom. He potters about the stage - yes, he potters; he doesn't stride, or walk, he potters - as if bemused to find himself here, in front of an audience, amid a hammering electro onslaught.

And a hammering electro onslaught is certainly what we're getting tonight. Alien Sex Fiend might have reconciled themselves to playing to goths, but the trance-dance makeover they applied to their music a few years back is still in full effect. There's a guitarist on stage, but he's a token presence, employed only to inject washes of sound into the mix. Everything else is down to Mrs Fiend, barely visible amid mountains of recalcitrant hardware. 'It's analogue!' insists Nik, as the electro-flow is interrupted by sundry glitches.

But the glitches can't stop the beats from rinsing. Tonight, the rush and the push of the Fiends' electrified dance, with Nik shouting snatches of lyric over the top like the loony on the bus, is a brew that, ultimately, weirdly, works. I haven't been over-impressed with the Fiends' attempts to re-engineer their sound for the dance generation before, but the sheer relentless charge of the music is somehow an appropriate soundtrack for the early hours of the morning in this big tin shed of a venue.

A vaguely familiar stuttering sequence briefly makes itself heard in the headlong tekno-scramble, and I realise, almost with a sense of shock, that this is 'I Walk The Line'. Catching snatches of old-school Fiend songs in amongst the hurtling beat workouts is a bit like meeting your granny at a rave. You're happy to see her, but you wonder what she's doing there.

'Now I'm Feeling Zombiefied' is an extended bout of shuddering sequencers, over which Nik Fiend occasionally shouts 'ZOMBIE!' while rooting in a dustbin, a piece of rock 'n' roll stagecraft which I must confess I'd never seen before. Frontman as addled hobo? Now there's a concept only Nik Fiend could pull off.

In the end, it's Mrs Fiend's show, more than anything. She controls the beats. In that, she controls everything. For much of the time, Nik Fiend looks like he could use a milky drink and an early night. His role is almost incidental as the rhythms crash around him in relentless waves.

Now there's a turn-up. Alien Sex Fiend have finally figured out how to make their trance-techno workouts work, but in doing so Nik Fiend has almost been written out of the script.

We're heading for sunrise at a rate of knots, now. That's it for day 3 of the WGT. One more sleep, and one more day to go...