POP REVIEW : KMFDM Fades After Big Start

KMFDM is about halfway along the path from the esoteric realm of performance art, where its career began, to the panoramic industrial-rock spectacle where it’s heading. The German band’s Palace show Sunday didn’t churn the dance floor into a frenzy, as fellow industrialists Front 242 did there a while back, and its lighting and sound didn’t add up to the withering assault of the genre’s kingpins Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, but it did have its moments.

With two art-monsters on the flanks--Sasha Konietzko (looking like a grim student radical with short hair and round dark glasses) and En Esch (a writhing, shaved-head alien)--and two long-haired guitarists who looked as if they’d been recruited from Lynyrd Skynyrd, KMFDM brought some distinctive metal and hard-rock textures to the requisite electronic beats.

That helped the show’s pace and variety, but it still lost some steam after the thrill of its opening salvo subsided. KMFDM’s best songs have an inescapable catchiness and a compelling mystery, even when the band’s complex rhetoric--it’s into manifestoes and such--is reduced to simple slogans. A few more top-of-the-line songs to back its confrontational instincts should make KMFDM a perfect “Lollapalooza” candidate next time around.

Second-billed Barkmarket functioned more as a provocative mismatch than a complementary warm-up band. Pushing a Nirvana-Meat Puppets vibe into the realm of dissonance, the New York trio triggered bellows of disapproval from the audience as it forged ahead with its harsh explorations.