The More You Live, The More You Love

Unheilig Lichter der Stadt / Live (Universal 0602537157259) Unheilig is my sensational discovery of this year. I know the band excist for twelve years now, but until March of this year I never had heard of this German band before. Within months I had all their albums and in June we visited the openings concert of the Lichter der Stadt Tour. And now they released Lichter der Stadt / Live, shot and recorded in the Rhein Energie Stadion in Cologne before an audience of 30,000 people. Compared to the concert in Meppen the stage looks more slicker. The luxe box is a real treasury, with the concert on double cd, on dvd and a second dvd with behind the stage scenes. The images are great and the spectator is drawn in the concert. Overviews are followed by close-ups of band and crowd, which turns this registration not only into a document for the public but the band as well. The sound is excellent and the bombast, like in Grosse Freiheit or the Rammstein alike songs Herzwerk,, Na...

Unheilig, Lichter der Stadt tour Support by Staubkind & Andreas Bourani 30 juni 2012, MEP Arena, Meppen, Germany An evening in Meppen. Oh how hard it was to get to the stadion. The parkings turned to be full so in the end we parked our car along a road. From there it was a 1.8 kilometer walk. Since we had to wait so long in the traffic jam, we arrived when Staubkind was already playing. Unfortunately we hardly knew the songs, so no setlist. What I heard was a band sounding like a clone of Unheilig. Time to have a drink, which turned out to be a journey on itself. Nearly 15 minutes waiting to get two drinks, and a girl at the counter which showed to be a bitch. The way she was serving the customers, if I was her boss I kicked her out right away. The stress overtook her totally and she abreacted it on the customers. Beerglasses were put down on the counter with such force that the content overflowed the glass. She nearly threw the change to the customers, and ignored people...

In the eighties I was a great fan of Die Neue Deutsche Welle which brought us bands like Nena, BAP, Spider Murphy Gang, Rheingold, Ideal, D.A.F., Falco, Trio and DŐF. Only a couple survived over the years and I stayed interested in BAP over the following years. But since the start of die Neue Deutsche Härte it seems some good German bands are coming up. One of these bands is Unheilig. Formed in 1999 by Der Graf, Grant Stevens and Jose Alvarez-Brill (ex De/Vision). In 2001 they release their first album called Prosper. The group gradually develops a good sense of marketing, by, especially with their later albums, delivering different extracted versions, often limited, of their albums and singles. When Stevens and Alvarez-Brill leave the band Unheilig becomes a bandwagon project of varying composition, on which Der Graf depends his musical escapades. With their seventh album, Grosse Freiheit, Der Graf is able to build a bridge with the German public, whom embrace the album and send ...