Six Bands Too Many

The Coca-Cola Soundwave Discovery Tour is a talent competition dressed as a concert, and the Arena Berlin is too large a venue to survive that kind of evening without casualties. Six opening acts, most of them ranging from bland to actively painful—amateur rock performed with maximum earnestness and minimum self-awareness—and then the previous year’s competition winner, who was somehow the worst of the lot and who seemed determined never to leave the stage. I stood there with Face For The Radio by The View stuck on loop in my head, which is what my brain does when it’s trying to protect itself from the outside world.

The one bright spot before the headliners was a German punk band called Andioliphilipp, from a small town in Baden-Württemberg that the Berlin crowd probably couldn’t have placed on a map. They ripped through their set like it was their last chance to matter—which, in a competition context, it essentially was—and earned the Rock am Ring slot they won. Loud, fast, no apologies. Worth the whole evening on their own.

The Kooks closed it out, and I felt a little sorry for them having to follow that marathon of mediocrity. But they’re good enough to reset a room, and songs like Naïve and She Moves in Her Own Way do exactly that—they remind you why you still bother going to live shows even when the evening requires extended patience to reach the good part. They saved it. I drank a Pepsi on the way out, partly out of spite and partly because it was what I actually wanted.