Live Review: Einsturzende Neubauten

Prior to their appearance at last year's festival, German industrial pioneers, Einsturzende Neubauten had only ever toured down under on two occasions, and only once prior to the current decade. Surprisingly, quite a low number for a band nearing their 40th anniversary. But thanks to the increasingly ambitious programming of Dark Mofo, they have arrived on our shores for the second year running and now the thought of such a long drought between drinks can be relegated to the distance of memory.

It's one thing for trivial, first-world problems, but can we so easily find distance from the collective trauma and patterns initiated by something like the Great War? It is through such lenses of enquiry that we arrive at Lament; Einsturzende Neubauten's performance piece, originally commissioned by the Flemish town of Diksmuide, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.

It feels like a bit of deja vu to see the suavely suited and barefooted Blixa Bargeld lead his band of musical pranksters out onto the stage of the Odeon Theatre. It's a fleeting sense, however. Tonight, the five core members are accompanied by a string quartet and keyboardist and from the moment this expanded ensemble embark on their aural journey, it's a stark contrast to the 'Greatest Hits' offering of last year. The subject matter and its apt musical expression invite an added sense of gravitas to the evening.   

Along with some of the more familiar looking custom-builds, the stage becomes occupied by a revolving armoury of exclusive instruments throughout. Included among them are decapitated artillery shells, a barbed wire harp, and a pair of musical crutches; all designed to "visually evoke the horrors the work describes". The visual element and embodied physicality of the live event certainly communicates "the filth and terror of the industrialised 20th-century world at war with itself" in a way that its studio reconstruction never could. But there is also something in the performance that allows for some respite and powerfully balances things with traces of optimism. Bargeld's regular witticisms play off these tensions with precise, black-comedic effect. He introduces Der 1.Weltkrieg (Percussion Version), explaining that each of the songs' 120pbm-4/4 beats represents a day in the war, and then at its conclusion, interjects, "It gives you an idea of how long that mess was. We did a version in 90bpm. It was unbearable." 

As was the case with the original performances, the suite is accompanied by two songs from the back catalogue. Sandwiched in the first encore, the first of these, Let's Do It A Dada, confronts the brutal realities of the theme with an absurdist response; acting as a kind of circuit breaker with disruptive commentary refusing the values and beliefs that underpin such atrocities. The second, Ich Gehe Jetzt (translated — I'm Going Now), placed as the final encore, serves as a farewell reminder that Lament was never just a concern of the past, but one of our present. Never simply a static enquiry into memory, but a dynamic enquiry into the very act of remembering. And finally, a call to critically renegotiate inherited patterns and beliefs in the service of agency. We are left see-sawing between hope and despair with the echo of these closing lyrics sending us out into the night: "More than ever since man started thinking, it's about time, the earth itself finally spins, transforms and breaks its bonds. I'm going now. I'm going now. I'm going now".