With the first big headliner concert for the new album “Kargo”, the Chemnitz band ended the festival summer on Saturday evening at Lollapalooza in Berlin: with brazenly cool homeland moments!
Are 70,000 visitors interested in one of the hippest festivals in the republic for cabaret pop from Chemnitz, to be seen in the midday pre-program on the small side stage? Kraftklub isn’t interested after all: As the headliner on Saturday evening, they just brought their rehearsal room neighbors Powerplush onto the stage at the Olympic Stadium to cook up the Icona-Pop-Smasher “I Love It” together. And it worked great: the two bands promptly created one of those cult goosebump moments that actually get you going to festivals like this; but where these have also become so rare in the midst of entertainment carpets produced in many places by the music industry, on which the vast majority of bands on which the festival decorations are hung can only keep their own spirit with great difficulty.
And here we are at both the Lollapalooza and Kraftklub’s “Kargo” headlining premieres. As for the former: Perry Farrell from the band Janes Addiction came up with the festival idea in the 90s as an alternative combination of free-spirited rock-pop-electro-crossover, art performance and artistry. That opened up horizons in the US; has meanwhile been industrially so perfidiously copied and eroded in terms of content that one actually has to speak of cultural appropriation: one shouldn’t think more closely when strolling about the sponsorship battle that is raging on the Berlin Olympic grounds in 2022, especially since the marketing spirit is also mixed up with all the sustainability and trying to cover up awareness issues that are actually so important to the younger generation.
But once the head is halfway out, it’s nice to look at, colorful and pithy, and the festival craftsmanship is also great, so you can have a good hipster time and enjoy yourself: Maybe the bands’ performances will give you a few hints of what once identified the original idea. Okay, not with acts like Apache 207, who draped an exemplary, listlessly high-gloss maxi-playback show in front of the mobile phone cameras of the crowd in the early evening.
But there is also, and here we are with the second, power club. With big heart-shaped eggs, the Chemnitz headliners gambled a “Live from the rehearsal room” set as a quasi-release party for their new album “Kargo”: With raw routine, self-confident three-quarter ability and immense joy in playing, but at the same time without pressure of meaning and exploitation, there was one Mix of classics and new songs that had washed up. Just the courage to rock out in this escalation class (the tens of thousands in front of the stage want to be animated to celebrate and be entertained down to the depths of the huge area) completely without backing tracks from the tape and therefore to sound comparatively thin, made the appearance quite unique: Yes, folks, that’s what an indie band with two guitars sounds like, that cultivates a rather elegant and slim tone and not a metalcore monster board sound. All the overfat that comes with most others like Spotify or CD comes from the studio.
The nice thing about it: Kraftklub did not flirt with this move in any way, the performance was not presented as an alternative in a musical landscape in which everything actually has to be exhibited somehow: It was simply a “Come as you are” without comment, that’s how it sounds Band, put the spoons on and here are the songs! And with that, you were closer to the actual Lollapalooza spirit than others.
After the classic prelude with “My Fans” and “I don’t want to go to Berlin”, “Blaues Licht” was the first proof of the pearly quality of some of the “Kargo” songs. The next came in “Fahr mit mir”, with Lotta Kummer, drummer of the Chemnitz band Blond and sister of the Kummer-Kraftklubber Felix and Till, taking over the part of Bill Kaulitz: Karl-Marx-Stadt, baby! Also “One song is enough” (in the encore), “Part of this band” and “Wittenberg ist nicht Paris” from the new album experienced a respectable baptism of fire. Side note: Only “Chemie Chemie Ya” from the previous album “No Night for Nobody” made it into the program – further proof of the class of the first two Kraftklub hit albums “Mit K” and “In Schwarz”, whose filling was the main driving force of the evening formed.
Frontman Felix, who looked like a mixture of Clockwork Orange rioters and Hogwarts prefects in the new band uniform jacket from the “Kargo” record cover, provided many fine moments of memory in addition to his tried-and-tested celebration animation with an undisguised earthiness, for example with the dimmed down version of “No love song” or the unrehearsed outspoken anti-AfD announcements about “Three shots in the air”. As long as such headliner shows are still possible in this over-the-top (and since Corona often hedonistically desperate) festival landscape, hope is not lost.