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Let's get something out of the way right away: I've been a KMFDM fan since the late eighties, when I blindly purchased the "Don't Blow Your Top" single on the strength of its Wax Trax! affiliation. I've seen them something like fifteen times, have a sickeningly complete collection of their output, and have worn out more KMFDM T-shirts than most of their fans have ever owned. Hell, I even dropped some serious coin on a piece of Aidan Hughes's (aka Brute!) artwork because their album covers got me hooked on his distinctive style. So when I tell you that Sturm & Drang is a disappointment, as live DVDs go, I hope you'll understand that I'm not making a snap judgment or dismissing the band out of pure dislike.
Note: For well over a year, this article featured a glaring error -- I listed Brute's real name as Raymond Watts rather than Aidan Hughes. It was only when I came back to this article to check some facts for another piece that I noticed the fuckup. The moral of the story: when you proclaim yourself an expert, double- and triple-check everything you write.
My biggest beef with the disc relates to the material. Because the Sturm & Drang tour promoted 2002's Attak, the bulk of the set's material comes from that largely bloodless album. Maybe it's me, but the Attak stuff seems particularly tepid compared to the group's past triumphs, and I couldn't get too involved in those songs; I found that I was more interested in identifying the individual venues at which each song was shot, and determining whether the editors used footage from more than one performance. That said, there are KMFDM "classics" like "Megalomaniac", "Rules" and "Godlike" scattered throughout the disc, which are at least more interesting to listen to.
This leads to another problem: this latter-day version of KMFDM simply isn't that interesting to watch. Admittedly, we have the visual spectacle of frontmen Sascha Konietzko and Ray (Pig) Watts, and the attractive Lucia Cifarelli adds some femininity to the proceedings; surely that should be enough, right? Sadly, no. Konietzko and Watts's shtick is largely limited to putting one foot on a monitor speaker and leaning into the audience, while Cifarelli, who has actual music-performance duties to be getting on with, can't provide the same eye candy payoff as KMFDM's previous Amazonian femmes fatale. Thus, despite the fact that the edits are tight and frequent, and the footage is of decent quality, Sturm & Drang can't hope to recreate the mad, sweat-soaked turmoil of an actual KMFDM show.
But isn't that always the case with live DVDs? I mean, it's kind of cool to buy a few of these things and get pristine video and high quality audio and lots of extras, but even the most inventive presentation isn't as good as actually being there, buying the T-shirt and getting kicked in the head by a crowd-surfing asshole. How many live DVDs have you actually watched more than once? Exactly. Within minutes, you'll stop paying attention to the songs and start counting the number of times Sacha's outfit changes during "Godlike". In this respect, Sturm & Drang is no worse than its peers.
The best live DVD I've seen to date, The Poster Children's Zero Stars, combined its live segments with dramatized tour diary segments that easily eclipsed the performance material. Sturm & Drang is redeemed by a wealth of diary-style "road" footage; we see the band relaxing on their tour bus, conducting interviews, sound-checking, shopping at record stores, acting generally touristy and fucking around in truck-stop convenience stores at all hours of the day. "Spit Sperm", which closes the live material, includes lots of additional "B-roll" footage -- we even see the band posing for the DVD's cover photos. Call me an old fart, but I'd rather watch an hour of the band shopping for stuffed animals, or Ray Watts interacting with a homeless guy, or band-members talking about the importance of treating their fans right, than a bunch of live footage; there's something fascinating about watching a bunch of weirdo musicians work their way through middle America.
There's a decent amount of entertainment on Sturm & Drang, and after watching it again, I like it more than I did before, but I hope the next KMFDM DVD is skewed more toward documentary than music. I'm willing to bet that a lot of hardcore KMFDM fans would agree with me.
-- George Zahora
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