Dart with The Subs in Cologne

The Berlin stop of the Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour had me skeptical going in—a liqueur brand running a touring pub concept sounded like a marketing exercise dressed up as a cultural event. It wasn’t. The format strips out the usual nightclub context and drops everything into an actual old pub: sticky tables, dart boards, card games, furniture that smells like a hundred previous evenings. Then The Subs came on and the room shifted. The Belgian duo’s jittery electro-punk doesn’t need a warehouse rave to work. It works better when the venue has low ceilings and everyone is already a little drunk on herbal liqueur.

The Cologne edition added Proxy to the lineup—the Russian producer who routes what sounds like Eastern Bloc analog hardware through a speaker system that has no business being that loud in a pub. I wasn’t there for that one, but I can picture exactly which corner the dart board was in and how far off the bull’s-eye I would have been.