Concerts to the Max

This past week has been rather ridiculous with shows. In the past 8 days, I have to been four different concerts: Die Ärzte, The Donnas, Die Fantastischen Vier, and The Hives. Two weeks ago I was also at the Kaiser Chiefs, but I won't really go into that because I was by myself and didn't take any pictures. To say the least, they were all very different. So just a quick review and some photos (but you can see all of them on my Flickr page) from this week:

Die Ärzte (The Doctors) are a German punk band from Berlin. They rock. The show was in the ginormous Kölnarena, which holds about 40,000 people, I think. Despite the monstrous venue, it was still a fantastic show. They played a mix of their old and new songs for three full hours and no opening band. Granted that I do not know a lot of their music, I had a good time with Kari and her boyfriend who came down for the show. Unfortunately, our seats were way up high and pretty far back, but even so, awesome time.

On Saturday, I went to go see The Donnas with Christian at a small club called Underground, which has a capacity of 350 people. Quite the opposite of Kölnarena! I'd like to point out the fact that this show was my 50th concert ever (I think). If it wasn't my 50th, one of the 4 this week definitely was. The Donnas were amazing and the new songs are killer. Of course, I was the most psyched to hear "Take It Off" since Stiny and I named our radio show after it. It was weird because the Donnas would say they were playing something "old school," which meant it was from the album Spend the Night (which came out in 2002). They played nothing off any earlier albums and only "Fall Behind Me" off of Gold Medal. I was a bit surprised to realize that I am an "old school fan," but proud of it. Oddly enough, the majority of the people there knew only new stuff off Bitchin'. Slightly sad that they only played for about an hour and a half, but nonetheless, that hour and a half was fun. Definitely better than when I saw them perform with Jet on Halloween a few years ago, except for the fact that they played no super old school songs.

The following day, Sunday, was back in the Kölnarena to see the German hip-hop group Die Fantastischen Vier (The Fantastic Four) with David and Zach. They're pretty much the Beastie Boys of Germany. Anyhow, the show was definitely really well thought out with lights and background and well, just plain frickin cool. I knew way more songs from Die Fanta Vier than from Die Ärzte, so I think I enjoyed myself a lot more. Not to mention our seats were much farther down. Die Fanta Vier also played for a long time (about 2.5 hours) and played a lot of old songs, like "Geboren," "Der Picknicker," and "Hausmeister Thomas D." Favorite songs of the night had to be "Take It Back" and "Was Geht." All in all, I have to say that the show was so good, in fact, that I think Die Fanta Vier are definitely in my top 5 arena shows, definitely over Madonna. One encore they did had a stage come down from the ceiling and then three of the four came out and rapped on it. Pretty sweet, if you ask me.

Finally, to top it all off, I saw The Hives tonight. Now, I've seen The Hives before, and they rocked then, and they still do. I managed to squeeze my way to the front against the barrier, which was really fun, but at the same time, not super fantastic because I got super squashed. It is interesting, though, that I felt really old in comparison to everyone else there. All of the girls were really flat and not curvy at all, and a high school student hit on me (sort of). The other thing is that I wasn't in the middle of the action like I was 3 years ago. That's when you know I'm getting old(er), when I think to myself, "I'm getting too old for this shit to jump around with teenagers." The show, of course, was indescribably amazing. Pelle really knows how to work the crowd into a frenzy (literally), his brother Nicholas Arson has the craziest expressions (and yet somehow they are kind of sexy), drummer Chris Dangerous is way hotter than I remember him being, and Dr. Matt Destruction and Vigilante Carlstroem rock really hard. The first three definitely have the hot rocker thing about them. (The other two are just not my type) Unfortunately, I had to go to this show alone because nobody wanted or was able to come. (Hence the high schooler hitting on me...sort of.) Despite this fact, I rocked my ass off and must say, The Hives win for best show of the weekend/month/year.

On a completely different note, I don't have to worry about finding an internship anymore because I found one, woo! It's with a German company called Clipfish.de, which is a subsidiary of RTL, the biggest entertainment channel in the country. The website is unfortunately inaccessible within the U.S. because it's blocked, but to put it simply, it's YouTube for Germans, with music videos from Sony BMG (they have a contract), some stuff that Americans would consider soft-core porn, etc. I'm really excited about it because it'll be a great opportunity to learn about new media, woo.