April 24, 2004
Kraftwerk show all those electro-pop guys how it's done

TORONTO -- Thirty years ago, Kraftwerk began teaching the world how to make electronic pop music. Since then, virtually every musician who has used synthesizers, turntables, vocoders, drum machines, keyboards or computers owes them at least a thank-you. Now, the inscrutable, witty and brilliant German quartet is back to teach everyone how to put on a show.

And thank heaven for that. The biggest problem with live electronic music is that there's almost nothing more boring than watching a guy on stage staring at a laptop, though few electronic musicians seem to care. The Kraftwerk geniuses blew that image away, however, as soon as they emerged from behind a curtain to the tune of The Man Machine.

First of all, there were four guys on stage, dressed identically in black suits and red shirts and staring at four identical laptops placed precisely in a line. Their mostly bald heads were lit dramatically to contrast with the brightly coloured projection on the screen behind them.

As they generously played nearly all their hits for the appreciative crowd -- with characteristic deadpan blankness and little movement apart from the odd leg swinging to the beat -- the projections changed. Sometimes they were blocks of intense colour, or just the shadows of the four man-machines at their stations. Sometimes there were mesmerizing views of oscillating waves or snappy animated graphics, as in Pocket Calculator and Computer World.

Other backdrops reflected the songs' subjects more literally, like vintage footage from the famous cycling race to accompany the 1983 single Tour De France as well as last year's revisitation, Tour De France Soundtracks, or shots of '50s models for The Model, highway footage for Autobahn, trains for Trans Europe Express and gorgeously cascading capsules for Vitamin. But whether they were retro or futuristic, they were often witty and always dazzling.

When the curtain opened for the encore, there were four robots positioned in the band members' places, with metal stilts holding them up, disturbingly real-looking heads and arms that moved up and down. Naturally, that was for The Robots, one of the band's most enduring songs.

But that wasn't all -- the next encore presented them in crazy suits criss-crossed with day-glo green stripes that played dizzyingly against the undulating green stripes on the screen behind them. After Elektro Kardiogram and their newest single, Aero Dynamik, the members left the stage one by one as the final tune, the appropriately titled Music Non Stop, was fading out. It was a fitting end to a spectacular show.

JAM! Rating: 4 out of 5