Trümmerratten, Fahrstuhl, and Ponys auf Pump on the MS Stubnitz - 1 February 2025

Well, he’s back, and it’s been a hell of a couple weeks.

The first time he was in charge felt like a fever dream, although granted, that may have been partly because of all the actual fever. With all the energy, curiosity and passion of the teacher’s least favorite third grader on a field trip to the art museum, we watched him barely go through the motions of a job he clearly despised, his only concern to remain at the center of attention. Then, after a temper tantrum that reminded us all why we don’t usually give two year olds twitter accounts with millions of followers, he was gone, and there was a brief moment when it seemed like we might not have to think about him anymore.

Then the price of eggs went up, candidates from a certain political party continued their tradition of taking bad advice, teenagers watched a lot of videos of asinine dudes playing video games or lifting weights or something, an incredible number of lies were told, and somehow all of this adds up to him being back. This time though, he’s out for revenge against everyone he feels has wronged or slighted him, which seems to be pretty much everyone, but most especially immigrants, trans people, anyone else covered under the going right-wing dogwhistle of DEI, and all the people who work for the federal government, who apparently really cramped his style last time with their stubborn insistence on obeying the law.

This time he’s also brought along a buddy, apparently some kind of golem molded from the gunk that settles at the bottom of the internet, who also happens to have more money than any other human being has ever had. Slightly less than .1% of that money was all it cost to buy his way into a kind of My Two Dads scenario in which no one seems to be quite clear about who’s really in charge, maybe not even them. Presumably each of them assumes himself to be the real boss, a situation which may lead to some friction down the road, but for now it’s all sunshine and rainbows as the two gleefully tear into essential government services, the function and purpose of which neither of them has ever even bothered to wonder about.

Meanwhile, the golem in question, not content with one de facto dictatorship, has started to go international with his meddling. In particular, he’s been cozying up to a certain right-wing political party in the country where I happen to live, a country whose history, or 12 years of it anyway, he seems to be highly invested in. This is just one in a series of fortunate events for said party, who were already polling in second place when the leader of the party that’s probably going to win the election later this month broke with tradition and did the thing that center-right politicians always seem to do when faced with a popular far-right movement. Now we’re all waiting on tenterhooks to see just how big the joyless smiles on their pinched white faces are going to be once the votes are cast and the deals are made.

{Update: Early February, when I first wrote this, three extremely long months ago, is already beginning to seem like a kinder and simpler time. I mean sure, they were already doing everything they could to gleefully demolish whatever is good or admirable about a country that I love, while showing an astonishing level of contempt for the people of said country, as well as it’s laws, allies, reputation, values, education system, health system, transportation system, press freedom, military veterans, libraries, museums, universities, disaster victims, and tourism industry, but at least they weren’t disappearing university students, deporting children with cancer who also happen to be citizens, accidentally sending innocent people to a foreign concentration camp and then ignoring orders from the Supreme Court to bring them back, arresting judges, criminalizing political opinions, and killing the pope. There’s also a bunch of economic stuff that would be pretty shocking on its own, but it’s kinda hard to focus too much on that when the concepts of due process and objective reality are on the chopping block.

One bright spot in all this is that the “first buddy” seems to be having a pretty bad time. Watching his epic “bully in the principal’s office” moment, in which he had the nerve to petulantly whine about people being mean to him after he talked endlessly about “making comedy legal again,” danced around on stage with a chainsaw, responded to criticism by throwing the R word around, and committed literal slander against the public servants he had thoughtlessly fired, was one of the few things on the news that’s made me smile so far this year, and we can only hope that by now you know who is starting to look around for a bus to throw him under by now.

OK, there’s certainly more to talk about, but I think that will do for today.

Now, on with the show!}

So what do you do when all the norms of society seems to be collapsing around you, but not in a good way, and the keys of power have been handed to the worst people imaginable? Well, where I come from, you go to a punk show.

Fortunately, there was good one Saturday night, a triple bill featuring Hamburg bands Trümmerratten (filling in for Teddies Kneipe of Bremen) and Fahrstuhl along with Berlin’s Ponys auf Pump, on offer last night on the MS Stubnitz, an old East German fishing boat that’s been parked on the Elbe and used as an alternative art and culture space for over 30 years. It’s a bit out of the way, and I got there pretty early, not realizing that the show wouldn’t start until almost two hours after the time listed on my ticket. As a result, it was extremely quiet as I walked along the embankment, and there was a kind of eerie majesty to the ship’s prodigious bow as it suddenly appeared out of the fog.

I immediately had a good impression from the people who scanned my ticket and served me at the bar, where they serve Störtebeker Pilsner, a solid choice in the often less than inspiring North German beer landscape. It turned out to be a very good thing that I was early, because it gave me a chance to explore a bit before the place filled up, and I have to say, this is absolutely one of the coolest venues that I have ever encountered. Somehow they’ve managed to create a comfortable and friendly space with ample room for dancing and even places to sit in both the bar area and the performance space below. The two spaces are connected by a large open skylight, giving the whole place a feeling of continuity, and this, like many other features of the venue, seems to have been directly guided and informed by the original form and function of the vessel. Everything about this place reminds you that you’re on a ship (the performance area is literally built into the exposed inner hull), and it’s all done with none of the slick corporate feel that I noted recently at Bahnhof Pauli. If you have a chance, it’s honestly worth going to a show there just to see the venue.

Thankfully, though, last night the venue was just one of many reasons to be there. The first band to take the stage was Trümmerratten. As I mentioned above, they were filling in for Teddies Kneipe, a feminist operation from Bremen with a homemade, rough and ready sound. I would love to see Teddies Kneipe and will seek out opportunities to do so in the future, but seeing Trümmerratten was definitely a special experience. Hamburg veterans who have claimed, I assume facetiously, to have once been voted the city’s top left wing band, you could definitely hear their eleven years of experience playing together in the tightness and confidence of their performance.

Their songs, for the most part, were perfect little kernels of punk energy, mostly clocking in at around one minute, with the guitarist/lead singer (despite there being a fair amount of stuff about them online, I can’t find their names anywhere) providing simple but potent riffs and flat, almost conversational vocals, punctuated by more energetic vocal responses from the bass player and drummer, although towards the end of their set they did open things up a bit with a few nominally more melodic numbers. One in particular, titled “Punktlichkeit” and featuring the memorable line “Ich scheiß auf Punktlichkeit, Punktlichkeit ist deutsch” even featured something that could be described as a guitar solo. This was followed by their most dramatic departure from punk norms, a song in 3/4 with a sound that I can only describe as klezmerish (but with no clarinet)

It was during their set, before a song called “Deutschland Raus” about the desire to leave a Germany that hasn’t properly learned the lessons of its past mistakes, that the singer/guitarist made the only direct reference to what’s been happening in politics that I caught during the show. There might have been others that went over my head — my German is not perfect — but there’s no doubt that it was a major theme bubbling under the surface of all three sets. A particular highlight of this set was the drummer, who, from what I can gather from the band’s blog, seems to have joined the band in 2018, when the original drummer, Laura, quit, although I guess it’s also possible that she is Laura, having reconsidered her decision. Whoever she is, in addition to providing extremely solid, hard-driving rhythms and vocals throughout the show, she seemed to positively glow with the joy of being there and making the music that she apparently loves, and this made it impossible, for me anyway, not to be pulled into the experience as well.

The second band to perform, Hamburg’s Fahrstuhl, seem to be a bit less established, or at least to have less information about them available online, than the other bands on the bill, although they have given themselves a name that produces a lot of false hits in a google search (in the tradition of other German bands like Can, Neu, Die Ärzte,…) so that might have something to do with it. Nonetheless, they were clearly who most of the people there had come to see, judging by the amount of action on the floor, and I can see why. A trio featuring synths in lieu of bass, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a punk band look quite so relaxed while performing. They accomplish this by pursuing an approach of extreme minimalism, with many songs built around alternations of two or three notes on the guitar, only slightly more elaborate swirling figures on keyboards that sound like a calliope inside a vacuum cleaner, and vocals, often in out-of-tune harmony between the guitarist and keyboard player (Once again, I can’t seem to find anyone’s name), delivered in unrelenting and uninflected quarter notes. All of this is backed up by the slightly more energetic but still notably sparse and clockish work of the drummer, whose Sonic Youth T-shirt may reveal something about where this band’s aesthetic direction is coming from.

Fahrstuhl managed to squeeze quite a bit of variety out of their stylistic direction, veering from bouncy chord-driven pop punk to songs with murkier metal elements to one number, “Skit ohne Fehler” that seems to be a re-texted version of Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro”. They even closed with yet another old-fashioned sounding song in 3/4, “Die Moritat vom Hotel Greven,” although this one had more of a cabaret vibe.  Fahrstuhl have described themselves, in promotional materials for this show among other places, as “late bloomers of the Hamburger Schule”. I can only assume that this reference to a musical movement which, to the extent that it really existed at all, was widely agreed to have ended in the mid-1990s, a good decade before the members of this band were born, is intended as a joke. Nevertheless, a connection could be drawn between their combination of stripped down punk and electronic sounds and some of the music that’s been labeled as Hamburger Schule, and of course their play on Lady Gaga is certainly reminiscent of Die Goldenen Zitronen’s “Für immer Punk”, which took a similar approach with Alphaville’s “Forever Young”. There was even one song (I think it was “Ein Mann ohne Fehler” but I’m not 100% sure) that made me think of some of the earlier, harder edged, songs of Die Sterne, but I suppose that might have been because I had already read the concert announcement.

The final act on the bill last night was Pony’s auf Pump, a band on Berlin’s Phantom Records who have made enough of an impression internationally to garner several reviews and mentions in Maximum Rocknroll. I’m not quite sure when they first got together, but they came out with their first self-released cassette back in 2017. Since then they’ve released a split album with a band called B’schißn (2020), a full-length LP, Wirt Schon Wieder (2021), for which they took their style in a strikingly psychedelic new direction, featuring towering guitars, more melodic and intricate song structures, and cavernous soundscapes, and a more recent EP, Probezeit(2023) that represented a decided turn back to their punk roots. This turn was certainly on display in their uncompromising performance Saturday night, but the group still seemed to occupy a different kind of space from the other two bands, less self-consciously subcultural and more concerned with cultivating a distinctive sonic experience.

The most compelling figure in Ponys auf Pump, and the member who makes the most defining contribution to their sound is the keyboard player/vocalist (again, no names :/), who sings like Grace Slick on a mountain top and exudes an air of complete relaxation while she effortlessly delivers hooky synth riffs and sways contentedly as if she were listening to Christopher Cross’s “Sailing”, regardless of the chaos happening all around her. Something of this serene vibe is shared by the understatedly virtuosic, workwomanlike bassist and drummer, but not so much the guitarist, who brings a high-strung, jittery quality to both his vocals and his surfy guitar work that makes a lovely complement to the pithier, more grounded contributions of the keyboardist. Special highlights of the performance included the title track from Probezeit, a song that features the surprise shift into double time at the end of the intro that seems to be one of the band’s trademarks, and “Wat Denn”, the opening song from their 2021 LP, which perfectly demonstrates their incredible potential as a rock band. Both are clever comments on the dehumanizing expectations that characterize life, and especially work life, in Germany. This theme played a prominent role in all three of last night’s performances, but these songs reveal a level of sophistication in both subtle narrative shaping and humor that most punk bands are, for better or worse, simply not interested in pursuing. They also showed that they can get down and dirty with the best of them, though, particularly through what was probably the most topical song of the night, “Bullenschwein”, PaP’s contribution to the hallowed punk subgenre of the cop taunt, focusing on the police’s (less and less) tacitly preferential treatment of right-wing demonstrators. This one was delivered with all the crudity and directness that the subject deserves. There’s a time and a place for subtlety, and it was nice to see that Ponys auf Pump understands that.

Considering all that’s been going on, there wasn’t nearly as much politics talk as I expected at last night’s show. It was an extremely cathartic experience, though, and maybe that’s what we all needed. It’s probably pretty clear that, of the three bands who performed, I was, and am, most excited about Ponys auf Pump, but that’s just my personal taste. All three gave laudable performances, and I will seek out opportunities to see each of them again. You should too, and if anything that sounds even remotely appealing to you is happening on the MS Stubnitz, by all means go!

Peter Lawson - 2.2.2025