After having extreme difficulty finding out how to buy tickets (it's difficult all over Europe, it seems), I finally made it to a little bar called White Trash Fast Food, which is all of 3 blocks from my apartment in Prenzlauerberg, East Berlin. When I entered the slimy basement (think Creepy Crawl in St Louis), I joined a group of obvious American ex-pats and incredibly attractive East-German hipsters. Wilderness soon began, and sounded, like before, wonderful, dark, brooding, and prohphetic. The effect in an actual club was not as intense as that at a house party in Indy, but the Germans, obviously unfamiliar to the music, warmed to it. I also very much enjoyed the songs from the new album, which I bought from the band after the set. I told them that I saw them (actually, met them) in Bloomington and Indy last year. "Small fucking world" was the only appropriate reply. I hope they feel a little creeped out when my friend sees them in Paris.
If Wilderness were the prohpets, though, then Liars were the armageddon, the living death of rock and roll. Their soundsystem was wonderful and pounding, maxing out the little club setting. I think it took a while for the crowd to get into the music, probably because Liars refused to open with anything from their new album, Drums Not Dead, which was recorded in Berlin. Instead they rocked out to quite a few songs from the debut, They Threw us in a ditch and Stuck a Monument on Top, and their underappreciated follow-up, They Were Wrong, so We drowned. The songs from the second album were overall the surprise hit of the concert with me; I could never fully appreciate the post-punk dub of the album until it was pounded into my chest. Yes, the concert reminded me (along with everyone else) of Wire (or, more precisely, Wir), but there were also touches of Joy Division; Liars' live show reminded me more of the cult icons' live sets (or the bootlegs I've heard) than the more glossy Interpol or Editors ever could. Around 4 or 5 songs into the set, once Liars finally broke out the new stuff, the Berliners were excitedly bobbing along with the screams. After a solid hour or so of non-stop rocking, with minimal chatting, Angus announced to the crowd: "now we#re going to go off stage for a couple of minutes, get something to drink, and then come back, if you're polite." The Germans and ex-pats were eerily silent, and I wondered if the band would return. Thankfully they did, for a rendition of "Broken Witch" that made my blood chill; the red lighting cast on the thick cloud of European smoke really did look like a red haze of blood, and Liars could easily be described as horse-men. The shreiks of the band, wonderful distortion, and of course drums drums drums did seem to be a cry from hell made by rock and roll. Fittingly, the band closed with a Nirvana cover, Territorial Pissings, devoting it to the only admitting teenager in the crowd: Gotta Find a Way a Better Way.... The crowd, recognizing the cover, called the band out for more, a second encore. The band told the crowd that they would make them regret that, and did, coming back with a distortion-ridden song that no one recognized (myself included). Maybe it was an Einstürzende Neubauten cover.
