Introduction
It was the Wave Gotik Treffen with the badest weather in it’s history: 30 dregrees transformed welldone make up into water, patchoullie aroma into sweat smellings and latex corsets into mobile saunas. The other people (the native) could only laugh about these dark guys; they wore shorts and t-shirts while we attracted perfectly, dressed in black. However – that’s what I call fetish! May they laugh, they’ll never understand! (Sometimes I think I won’t never understand too – however). I was curious about the fact that the girls at the Wave Gotik Treffen weren’t suffering a circulatory collapse one by one. Well, the male gothics had there fun tough – who doesn’t like to look onto that sweating, latex-dressed girls, always with an erotic red shimmer at the cheeks, short of breath?
Like every year there was a big traffic jam at the roads to Leipzig. I started about three hours earlier than I did last year, but still arrived at the same time. Unbelievable! Time seems to be unimportant, when one decides to to join that gloomy dream which people call Wave Gotik Treffen. In fact, it’s a dream: four days vacation of your job, of your life, of your sorrows. Four days without the rules of reality.
As usual there were billion of people before the sale of tickets. It was a long and slowly moving snake made out of gothics, horror rockers and dark punks. Lucky as I was, I got my ticket very quickly at the press counter. Under the glances of thousands I crept quickly into Agra, hopefully to get my photo pass without problems.
FRIDAY, 09.05.2008
After a while I entered the concert hall at the Agra, where the first band I wanted to watch allready has played: DAS ICH. Rumours said they were a very genius Live band. This evening they rocked too and I really was disappointed that I missed them. No problem, I thought and watched the last songs of SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK.
That band was big in the 80thies. Some evil tongues are telling that they did care more about there makeup than about their music. Tons of hair styled like a tower reaching into the sky, piercings, tattoos and futuristic sounds were new to the days now gone. Well, this evening I didn’t see the glammer they had before ages – they were mixed badly and played without pressure. After their latest album they should have splitted up, so I cannot say who of the originals played there. It’s a fact that the vocalist didn’t hit the right tunes. Bruce Dickinson doesn’t do so, but that guy had an incredible show where he runs hundreds of metres, while the vocalist of SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK just sang very badly. There was no live show and was getting bored. The bad mix crowned that performance. No compression, no equalizing, nothing what could helped that very problematic sound at the Agra hall. Instead of that, the mixer tried to help the vocalist and put tons of reverbs at the vocals. Scary. This effect returned after 300ms from the Agras ceiling and fucked my ears up. No Sirs, nothing for me. Meanwhile I have the opinion that no 80thies band should play at this hall. The music is not composed for that hall, that’s all. Synths are sounding thin, which is a problem with the high ceiling and the echo: you hear everything. A guitar driven band should not have these problems. OK, not photos, I was too late, but I saw another cult band.
UNHEILIG was the next band. The sound has been improved LOTS. Slightly compression on the guitars made everything as tight as hell (like a smoothy, eh?). Der Graf, vocalist of UNHEILIG is an extremely charismatic person and a very good vocalist. I was not curious about the thousands of girls in the first rows. A perfectly live show did the rest. Most people I saw were really glad with that performance and UNHEILIG has won their game. I am not a huge fan of this kind of music, but I have to admit that these musicians are highly professional. All songs are well composed and use excitement and speed at best places. Some songs have parts at which people can sing along, that’s perfect for many. Check that band out, if like that music. If you don’t like but have nothing else to do you should check UNHEILIG out too.
The DRAGONS sound like JOY DIVISION, someone said. That was reason enough to move Dragonson to the Werk II, my favourite location in Leipzig. I had to check out this statement. Cause the name is widely used, here is the direct link to that band: http://www.dragons.cc/ .As the band started, I thought the gates of heaven have opened. Crystalclear sound, cool and rocking songs with quite a simple structure (this is good, guys!), melancholy and very, very good vocalist who threw lots of roses into the audience. The current CD is “HERE ARE THE ROSES”, and I guess that is why. All females were glad, and the feminine males were too. JOY DIVISION isn’t too far, but I listened to the CD later and DRAGONS have their own style.
It would be unfair to compare them with the DIVISION. DRAGONS are well-done alternative rock. I am glad they have their own identity. Who needs something else? The show was one of a rock band. Anthony Tombling (great name, by the way) sang with impressing gestures, full of emotions. He dramatized his songs, threw himself at the bottom in extacy and yeah, this man had his fun. I bought instantly the CD, my first at this festival. As mentioned, the mix was perfectly and all the synths were integrated very well. One of the best mixes this weekend tough. I had the feeling that DRAGONS had their own mixing engineer, so perfectly was everything. Guitars were very brilliant and the drums came with high pressure and crispy (good god, do native speaker say that like this??). If the DRAGONS from the UK return to germany, I will be there, and it is highly recommended that you visit them too, if they are near you. Buy the CD and learn to sing all the songs, that’s what I did 