Review of Kreator - At The Pulse Of Kapitulation: Live In East Berlin, 1990 (DVD/CD)

My introductory paragraph is usually reserved for some sort of band history, but if you need an introduction to Kreator, then yer crazy ass must've forgotten the "n" when you Google searched "mental review". You're in the wrong place, but we wish you a speedy recovery. For the throwback aficionado, this is a nice little slice of history. It isn't for everyone, but it is a must-have for the fanatics that have a special place in their hearts for 1990, the fall of the Berlin wall, tight jeans, hi-tops, and Mille Petrozza's leather pants when they were still youthful and vivacious.

I'm a little embarrassed that I've never seen this. This vid was originally released on mostly reliable, but eventually perishable and then crumbling VHS tape 18 years ago when it was called, bluntly, Live In East Berlin, and what's under review here is a re-mastered re-release re-named, re-packaged, re-formatted, re-mixed by Andy Sneap, and re-considered by me, meaning that I took into consideration that I ran the risk of being called a poser if I didn't hurry up and watch this furious footage from a festival that featured the who's who (Kreator, Coroner, Sabbat, Tankard) of that particular moment in German thrash history. As for Kreator's situation at the time, it couldn't have been more ideal. Extreme Aggression came out in '89, it was their Columbia Records debut (which was a praise-worthy feat in itself) and this concert was, if I'm not mistaken, the first heavy metal concert allowed under Berlin's wall-less new regime. So imagine if you will the monolithic proportions by which this show was measured. An ideal video opportunity what with Kreator being at the pinnacle of their career, on their home turf, and headlining a historic event. Pan across the crowd of what looks like several thousand or so little wide-eyed pit-starved German thrashers creating a sea of denim, leather, and evil hand gestures, and you can't help but get a bit heavy-hearted, the total flipside to the scene I witnessed when I saw them at a small club in Chicago on that same tour. I was but a child in a crowd of tens, but the visuals at hand on this DVD are a testament to their consistency (for inconsistency) based on what little I remember from that night.

The set-list doesn't draw heavy from any one period of their only five year career at the time the show was filmed. It's spread out and not Extreme Aggression heavy, so in that respect, the CD audio only portion of this package makes for a good "best of live" compilation. It helps, I guess, that Sneap was brought in to reduce and compress this and that, and make these 15 tracks shiny, depending on how you like your live experience. Personally, I enjoy a live recording that makes me feel like I'm standing on blood and catching urinal fumes from the latrine overflow, and I find that Sneap's rendition is a bit overly Sneaped. Kreator, god bless 'em, weren't the air-tightest outfit. So the 60% of the time that they managed to bang hair, relocate from stage right to stage left, and hit the same notes at exactly the same time, ends up sounding pretty damn close to the actual album cuts due to the studio filtering process used to work this over. The other 40% slop gets brought into the spotlight however. The 12 year old in me would have liked the actual physical sound to have stayed just a bit corrupted, but the CD is merely a "packaging support system", aka the soundtrack to the DVD, with the DVD being the real investment here. You'll get the aforementioned full-roster-syncopated-headbang scene in front view and side view, the obligatory individual-band-member-with-one-leg-up-on-the-monitor-while-banging shot, the occasional color-switch-to-black-and-white-when-you-least-expect-it hi-tech studio wizardry, and then some close-ups of Mille and the boys with their thrash faces on thrown in for good measure. If I had seen the original 1990 VHS version, would I have appreciated this more? you tell me. I can't gauge just how much this was doctored if at all. Anyway, Kreator would still have to be your absolute favorite band in order to sit through all fifteen songs. I can make it through about eight before my second or third yawn. They weren't the most lively bunch. I'd say do one of two things quickly before you fall asleep. Hit up your menu again and head for the thought-provoking documentary, appropriately titled The Past and Now, or if you're feeling like no thoughts whatsoever, go for the twenty-something minute low budget horror flick that accompanied their Coma Of Souls album in '91 that I have absolutely no recollection of called Hallucinative Comas. I didn't really gather much from Hallucinative Comas aside from it being barely bloody and plotless unintentional hilarity with which to use as a vehicle to push four new Kreator songs. Did i miss something? I happen to still thoroughly enjoy the Coma Of Souls material, so I'll let the b-movie slide. It's all fun and games in a "Dude. This smells like shit. Smell it." kinda way, but the gold is in the eye-opening seventeen minute documentary where journalists, various media personnel, and the general public who were scattered throughout that magical evening speak out on the magnitude of this one show in a place where heavy metal concerts were not allowed. It's a humbling experience to hear the stories of little headbanger children having to buy individual pages of their favorite metal mag because of the high cost of owning the entire thing. This doc is required viewing for the historically-ignorant such as myself, and as a whole, At The Pulse Of Kapitulation is worthy of a connoisseur's shelf space.

And-goddamn-do-I-love-hyphenating.

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Kreator

At The Pulse Of Kapitulation: Live In East Berlin, 1990 (DVD/CD)

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