A Wild Welcome to a German Teen-Pop Band
By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: February 20, 2008
If you had found yourself on Irving Place on Monday afternoon you might have noticed a few hundred amped-up fans — mainly young, almost exclusively female — standing in line. And you might have wondered what was going on.
And if you had shown up at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza a few hours later for the concert that drew such an eager crowd ... well, you might still have wondered what was going on.
The occasion was the first New York performance by Tokio Hotel, a German act that scrambles musical categories in a way that feels ideally suited to the current era. Why shouldn’t fans go nuts for a goth-punk boy band influenced by the darkly theatrical love songs of HIM (from Finland) and AFI (from California) and led by a sexy androgyne with spectacular hair? Why shouldn’t the members of Tokio Hotel be given a chance to bring their not-quite-idiomatic refrains — “We are here tonight/Leave the world aside” — to the United States?
Now they have that chance. In April they plan to release their first American album, “Scream” (Cherrytree/Interscope). And their Monday performance was one of a few concerts — including one in Los Angeles last Friday — designed to introduce the band in this country. (Tokio Hotel regularly tops the charts in Germany and has had hits throughout Europe.) On Monday night no introduction was needed; most of those fans had already discovered the band online.
To watch Tokio Hotel live is to gaze at that gender-bending singer, who answers to the disappointingly unglamorous name of Bill Kaulitz. He is 18, and he looks like an anime version of Christian Siriano, the precocious star of this season’s “Project Runway.”
In his soft, pleading voice you can hear some of the complications of life as a teen idol: to his fans he’s not only a sex symbol but also a potential confidant and maybe a role model; he is an intermediate figure, standing between the girls in the crowd and the men in the band. But compared with Mr. Kaulitz, those band members (including his identical but very differently styled twin, Tom Kaulitz) couldn’t help but seem underwhelming. As they trudged, sometimes clumsily, through a short set, they seemed a lot less sophisticated than the skinny guy in front, who looks as if he has been honing his stage act since birth. If this concert was oddly delightful from start to finish, thank Bill Kaulitz, who should, with any luck, be thrilling and perplexing young Americans for the rest of the year.
During the best songs — like “Monsoon,” one of the band’s biggest hits — the contrast between singer and band was charming. “Monsoon” is effective because it’s surprisingly restrained: the music stays quiet, and the band doesn’t really kick in until after the second chorus. And when the noise finally came, there was a pleasing sense of devolution, as a teen-pop juggernaut with eyes on an American prize regressed into an exuberant garage band, making a gleeful racket.
p.s. Кому надо, переведу
