Rammstein
Rammstein is a musician.
Six men formed Rammstein in Berlin in 1994 and not one of them has left. Till Lindemann sings, Richard Kruspe and Paul Landers play guitar, Oliver Riedel plays bass, Christoph Schneider drums and Christian Lorenz plays keyboards, and several of them came through the punk acts Feeling B and First Arsch before any of this began. The working method has been just as stable: the band builds the instrumental first, and Lindemann writes and sings the words over the finished piece.
That order of operations explains the sound. The music is blunt on purpose, mid-tempo more often than fast, assembled from guitar figures that behave like machinery, with the keyboards carrying whatever melody and menace the guitars are too heavy to lift. Nothing is in a hurry. Over the top, Lindemann rolls his consonants into something between a drill sergeant and a narrator of fairy tales, and the German is a feature rather than a barrier, because the language does the theater for listeners who cannot understand a word of it.
They have never been subtle and have never claimed to be, which is the source of the provocation rather than an excuse for it. A band this precise is obviously choosing to be this crude.
Music (13)
Where to start with Rammstein
Mutter is where the two halves of the band finally stop fighting, and it is the right place to start: the orchestration is enormous, the songs are still built from four-note guitar figures, and the slow ones hit harder than the fast ones.
Work backwards next. Sehnsucht is the record that broke them outside Germany and the most relentless of the early ones. Herzeleid is rougher and closer to the punk background, the least theatrical thing they have made.
Then forward. Reise, Reise is the widest of the mature albums, Rosenrot is the offcuts record and considerably better than that sounds, and Zeit is the late one where the tempos drop and the band turns unexpectedly reflective.
The live albums are not filler here, because the show is half the argument. Live aus Berlin catches them young and dangerous, and Völkerball is the proper introduction to what the stage production actually involves.