The metallic clank and screech of cult German industrial band Einstuerzende Neubauten's homemade instruments are chillingly appropriate for "Lament," its idiosyncratic performance for the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.
Since bursting onto the Berlin punk scene in the early 1980s, blending guitar feedback, road drills and lumps of metal, the band — whose name means "collapsing new buildings" — has become increasingly highbrow, winning a five-star review for the album of "Lament" in Britain's Financial Times.
Alternatively loud and lyrical, using a dulcimer strung with barbed wire and crutches played like a cello as well as a string quartet, "Lament" portrays the horror of the 1914-18 war without patriotism or nostalgia. Somehow, the show — now in the middle of a 17-city European tour — also manages to be entertaining.