Nitzer Ebb Lets Loose Anger . . . Without a Guitar in Sight

Rock is accustomed to seeing many passionate young artists with guitars--Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen and U2, among them--face the challenge of grappling with maturity as effectively as they did the frustrations of youth.

But Nitzer Ebb may be the first young rockers with synthesizers to face that hurdle. Yes, the pioneering English industrial-rock group, whose members are in their mid-20s, is maturing.

At least, Nitzer Ebb, which played at the Variety Theatre on Thursday and Friday, may be the first angry young rockers with synthesizers to make the move. In fact, the group was among the first to use the electronic instruments as tools of expression for anger; they’ve tended to be used as the soundtrack for alienation (cf. Depeche Mode), while guitars have been the instrument of choice for those releasing unbridled anger.

At Thursday’s show there was certainly no lack of the latter expressed by the group on stage, without a guitar in sight. Actually there were hardly any instruments at all, just percussionists Bon Harris and Julian Beeston behind singer Douglas McCarthy, with the rest of the stark, pounding music coming from recordings. In essence, Nitzer Ebb and a few other pioneers, including Chicago’s Ministry and new industrial leader Nine Inch Nails, are inventing a new language to describe their struggle to adulthood.

“Maybe the process is new,” said Harris, 26, backstage before the show. “It’s a late-20th-Century thing. But the end result is the same. You still want the same results as traditional rock ‘n’ roll, the same release.”

But it’s a cold release. For most of the Variety show, the music and lyrics were brutal and colorless representations of an unfeeling world. Yet the young fans reacted with the same fervor that would be seen at the most emotion-filled concerts, storming the stage and filling the aisles as soon as the lights went down, and greeting each new pounding electronic beat with gleeful recognition.

Kristina Kaminski, a 17-year-old senior at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, explained: “You can’t go through life all the time depending on your emotions. It’s your mind that gets you ahead in life, not your emotions. And Nitzer Ebb just appeals to something inside me, like an outlet for frustrations.”

But here’s the dilemma: As the band grows older, it is finding it wants to explore emotions. Selections from the new album, “Ebb-head,” take steps toward that end, with a wider range of both instrumental and lyrical textures. Songs such as “Lakeside Drive,” though still rather harsh, even cast a tender eye on love.

“When we were writing things at 15 or 16 we were mad, wanting to be treated like an adult when the world saw you as a child,” said McCarthy, 25. “We were lucky that we vented that through music. . . . As you get older you get more adept at showing softer sides and not feeling that you’re encouraging people to give you a good kicking.”

So what happens to the fans who aren’t ready to expose their softness? That, McCarthy said, can be left to other bands who have taken up angry synthesizers since Nitzer Ebb started its recording career in the mid-’80s. (The band’s name is meant to give a European image, and is essentially a Dada-esque nonsense name.)

“Personally, I feel it’s good having other bands copying what we started out doing, ‘cause it allows us to go on,” he said. “Fans of our early material can listen to bands that sound like that.”

At this point, though, the fans are staying with Nitzer Ebb even as they embrace newer acts. The Variety audience was a relatively diverse crowd--thanks in part to exposure the group has gotten through patronage of Depeche Mode, whose Alan Wilder co-produced “Ebbhead”--though fiercely loyal and committed to this new form of expression.

The irony is that Nitzer Ebb would have originally preferred to wield guitars when the group was formed by McCarthy and Harris as teens in Chelmsford, about 25 miles outside of London. But they were just too, well, angry to bother.

“The bands we were listening to were Bauhaus, the Birthday Party, Killing Joke, all guitar bands,” McCarthy said. “But we had no patience for learning to play guitar, so we got synthesizers and learned to make them sound like guitars.”

Though they don’t sound like guitars now, it’s still guitar groups Nitzer Ebb admires.

“Everything I like is rock,” McCarthy said. “Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers--all American bands.”

Fans may want to take note of that: “We’re still full of energy and want to carry on,” he said. “There’s nothing stopping us in five years or 10 years to be a rock band. Nothing’s stopping us from learning to play guitars if we want. It’s never too late.”