[Sethomas]

I guess Rammstein is still a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. Rosenrot totally sucked though, I have no idea why they decided to take all the tracks not good enough for Reise, Reise and try to stand them up on their own.

I've seen them live twice, once in 1998 and then in 2001. As a 14-year-old watching them with my older sister, the stage theatrics when Till simulated the rape of Flake for the song "Bück Dich" with a power-loaded 12-inch phallus were somewhat awkward.

I met them before the show in 2001 and I asked them, in stuttering German, to play the song "Feuerräder". They weren't amused.

I'd say that I used to have them on a pedestal because they were "my band", I listened to them years before anyone else had heard of them, I had to defend them throughout the Columbine fallout, yadda yadda. Nowadays, I think that they do have a tendency to get rather formulaic. I remember at one point noticing that most of the songs on Sehnsucht had basically the same musical structure as every Wesley Willis song. They're really at their best when they write a song that keeps changing directions. Hence, my favorite songs of theirs would have to be Heirate Mich, Adios, and Mein Teil along with the formulaic ones like Kokain, Engel, and Du Riechst so Gut.

All in all, I'd have to say that Mutter is their best album. When Mutter came out, I could easily prognosticate that their fourth album (to come three or so years later) would follow on the trend of sounding ever less organic and far more calculated. I thought that going this direction from Herzeleid to Sehnsucht was a bad thing, yet from Sehnsucht to Mutter is became a good thing. Surprisingly, Reise, Reise had for me basically the same feel as Mutter, it just wasn't undertaken well or as consistently.

While I do like the title track, Rosenrot managed to invoke the spirit of Rammstein that I first grew to love as an early teenager while using it so poorly that the album is almost unlistenable.

As far as other "similar" groups go, I tried to give Megaherz a listen and found them abjectly idiotic. At the 2001 Rammstein show, they had people passing out Megeherz fliers that were like, "Do you like GERMAN LYRICS? Do you like METAL? Do you like BEER? Then you'll LOVE Megaherz!"

The other German band that I adore is called Die Toten Hosen. Up until the mid-90s (they've been around for a long, long time) they were distinctly punk, and while most people still call them punk they've certainly evolved into a very universally pleasurable form of it that just seems like generic rock. Their really is no way to convey how fucking amazing DTH is, whether for their socially conscience anthems or their gut-wrenching emotional catharsis or their elegies to drinking and fucking. It's frustrating because they'd be bigger than U2, I think, if people had the patience to learn their lyrics.