15th Wave Gotik Treffen - Part 3

Bands in order of appearance:
Love's Labour's Lost
Voices Of Masada
Ausgang
Gotterdammerung
Tragic Black
All Gone Dead
Bloody Dead And Sexy

Werk II, Leipzig
Saturday June 3 2006

We're back in Werk II, Leipzig's own post-industrial music venue, for an afternoon-to-evening show which features bands of the deathrock-ish persuasion. I say 'deathrock-ish' because the stylistic parameters are drawn fairly loosely, but I think we can be sure there won't be any EBM interruptions at this one.

To open things up, we have the very Shakespearean Love's Labour's Lost, who turn out to be a strange hybrid of deathrock and, wait for it....folk-metal. Yes, really. I don't know if that's an intentional mix-up - perhaps they reckon there's a crossover market here, as yet untapped - but the vocalist and bassist are certainly doing that post-Christian Death thing, all spiky hair, lapels festooned with badges, and noo-wave attitude. Alongside them on stage, a metal guitarist rocks his goateee beard and leather keks like he's auditioning for Lacuna Coil, while a winsome young lady sends keening folkie violin out into the hall.

The appearance of the band amounts to an odd juxtaposition of images, and the music teeters on that same cusp. When the singer gives it his best Batcave wail, the band sound like bona-fide deathrock daddies. Then that big RAWK guitar comes crashing in, and I'm hard pressed to prevent my hands making involuntary metal fingers gestures in the air. It's an, erm interesting collision of styles, I'm prepared to say that. But as to whether it works...hmmm. Jury's out, guys.
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There's no doubt about the stylistic arera inhabited by our next contenders. Voices Of Masada are a straight-up trad-goth band. Crossovers? They're for speakers and railway lines. They've got their style staked out, they know their audience, and they give 'em just what's required. Which is, essentially, Sisters-of-the-Nephilim style gothic rock. Quasi-mystical lyrics, plangent guitar and stentorian vocals over a drum machine beat.

Plenty of bands have done that kind of stuff over the years, of course, not least the Sisters themselves. But there are plenty of people who want to hear more, and many of them seem to be in Werk II today. Voices Of Masada enjoy an enthusiastic reception, and this seems to galvanise the band into putting on a slightly more intense show than I recall them delivering on the occasions I've caught them on stage back in the UK.

That's not to say they come leaping out like Kiss on amphetamines, or anything: even when they're being intense, a Voices Of Masada show is never less than measured. But this gig, far larger than anything the band are likely to get at home, seems to be their natural territory, and they rise to the occasion.
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Ausgang command instant interest and a whole lot of respect - as you'd expect, given their reputation as original scene pioneers, genuine 80s post-punks still giving it some formidable welly in the twenty-first century. But I can't help wondering if the wave Ausgang have successfully surfed in the two years or so since their reformation is about to break.

Notwithstanding their formidable old school history, today they're holding down a fairly lowly slot - third band on at a seven band gig, with several younger, newer bands above them who can't boast anything like Ausgang's impressive back story.

But then, maybe this illustrates a simple point: history ain't everything. It's what you're doing now that really counts. And if what you're doing now is playing a set of mainly 80s alterno-anthems to an audience which was probably in nappies when the tunes first came out - well, there's a limit to how far you can go with all that. I suspect Ausgang have pretty much bumped up against that limit.

Still, the band delivers a show of massive energy and thunderous rhythms, all shot through with a robust, no-prisoners attitude that, for me, recalls The Birthday Party - Ausgang's contemporaries, of course - in their early-eighties heyday. The song that really puts the hammer down is 'I Am A Horse', a mighty blasting thing, a rockslide down a mountain, a broadside of cannon fire, an unstoppable volcano of sound. Great stuff indeed. It's just rather salutary to remember that this particular song is now almost 25 years old. What have the band got now to match it?
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At the risk of being tactless, it's probably worth noting that Gotterdammerung have been around the block a few times, too. I recall the band playing London over ten years ago - now, in 2006, I'm interested to see if they've changed much. Well, they have and they haven't. In a kind of back to the future deal, they now seem much more deathrock than I remember. They come on like a kind of trad goth Virgin Prunes, wailing fit to wake the dead, but always keeping the music rooted in the solid foundations of gothic rock.

There's a theatrical interlude, in which the bassist smears black paint over the singer, although don't ask me what, if anything, this means. The singer picks up a guitar and bashes out some discord: it's obvious he can't really play, and this is just a ploy to make more noise. Which is fine, although I'm not sure why he seems so hesitant about it. C'mon, mate, bash that thing!

I'm waiting, expecting, the band to really kick things off and get fierce, but they never quite do it. A kind of five out of ten show for me, I reckon. Gotterdammerung strike me as a band that never quite lets go.
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Tragic Black are a US deathrock band, and that fact alone guarantees them a certain attention straight off the bat, what with the USA being the throbbing heartland of all things deathrocky. And Tragic Black certainly don't stint on either the essential image or the essential sound. They look like a gang of glam-punk droogs on mischief bent, and they sound like Ziggy Stardust having a dust-up with Johnny Rotten. If an alien from the planet Thraaag beamed down and asked me, 'So, just what is a deathrock band?' I'd point to Tragic Black and say, cop a load of that lot, mate. That's deathrock for you.

And the band certainly knows how to kick a show around. They come barrelling out of the traps like stormtroopers in distressed fishnet, the singer climbing the monitors as if he's intent on looking the audience in the whites of their eyes. It's a fine, grandstanding performance, and if Tragic Black sometimes come over as a little too generic - having set up their Ziggy-versus-Johnny thing, they don't really vary it at all - within their stylistic corrall they've got the monster well and truly roped.

Stitch of All Gone Dead, who was once in this band, comes out for a guest romp with his old muckers, and it's interesting to note he pitches things far more towards the punk zone, giving it loads of aggression, compared to the rest of the band's glammie approach. The deathrocker contingent in the crowd (which, at this show, is virtually all the crowd) seems mightily impressed, and well they might.

It's an odd paradox of deathrock that while everyone thinks that the scene is full of fishnet-clad glam-punkers with towering hairstyles and killer riffs, in fact there aren't all that many bands around who fit that style. It's Tragic Black's genius and good fortune to hit the stylistic spot exactly, and let's face it folks, they do it well.
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Strobelight, Germany's leading deathrock label, has a new bunch of stars in the making. They go by the name of All Gone Dead, and as if to reinforce the feeling of great expectations, the band has been slotted in to the second-top position on this bill. That's a plumb spot for a band which is still quite new, and, of course, it's a long way to fall if it all goes wrong.

Fortunately, All Gone Dead have the chops to deliver. The present line-up of the band is a fearsome punkzoid monster, all colours and spikes and fizzing energy, like a Lucozade-fuelled version of Rubella Ballet. The sound and the spectacle All Gone Dead brew up on stage is, dare I say it, much more exciting than the sometimes over-cautious feel of their album would have you believe.

Compare the way 'The Holy City Of Karbala' comes roaring out at the crowd, like a monster unleashed from its cage, with the far more mannered album version. Those chorus shouts of 'One Nation!' that rip out from the PA, fit to strip the paint from Werk II's roof girders, are the sound of a band igniting the afterburners. If All Gone Dead can capture the essence of their live show on CD, they'll have it made. Tonight's set proves they certainly know how to wield the lariat.
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Last year, Bloody Dead And Sexy headlined this very venue, apparently as a result of a last-minute line-up shuffle that saw them bumped up into the top spot unexpectedly. They grabbed the opportunity will all hands. Having thus proved themselves, this year they're back as the no-quibble headliners, claiming the top of the tree as a natural right.

You can almost taste the anticipation in the air: everyone's expecting this one to be good. And...it is, although I'm going to damn Bloody Dead And Sexy with faint praise here and say it was good, but not great. The band envelope themselves in a vast cloud of smoke, through which the stage lights gleam dimly. The musicians are visible only as vague shapes in the fog. I suppose the intention is to create an atmosphere, but in fact the wall of smoke forms a barrier between band and audience, a virtual shutter brought down in the faces of the fans.

Thus it is that it's down to Rosa Iahn, the band's vocalist, to carry the show. He employs bursts of high drama, declaiming the lyrics like a mad poet, wrangling with the mic stand, and climbing on the PA stacks. But then, curiously, at other times he seems to lose energy. He steps back, delivering the songs from within the obscure safety of the fog, apparently reluctant to really try and communicate.

The songs churn out, and the sound is punchy enough. But the performance itself doesn't have any real intensity. It's a decent enough run-through, but when you're in the headline slot you really have to deliver more than a 'decent enough' set. The contrast between Bloody Dead And Sexy's appearance last year - when they really had something to prove - and this year, where they seem to be taking things easy in a cloud of smoke...well. It's one for the Could Do Better file, I think.

I suppose, if there's a conclusion to be drawn from this gig, it's that supposed status is not necessarily a guide to how well the bands are going to deliver on the night. We've seen experienced veterans and acknowledged stars outclassed by hungry new contenders, and in many ways that's a good thing. It proves that everything is still moving forward. But it also proves that nobody can afford to rest on any laurels around here.

This way for the Wave Gotik Treffen - part four

Back to the Wave Gotik Treffen - part two