POP AND JAZZ REVIEWS : Industrial Noise, Chaos at the Palace

Although industrial music has mutated into more digestible forms of rock since the hugely influential German band Einsturzende Neubauten helped forge the genre a decade ago, the group banged out MTV-resistant shards of noise at the Palace on Friday as though nothing has followed them.

As singer Blixa Bargeld howled like a banshee to the rhythms of power drills and other workshop tools, Neubauten’s factory-like sound echoed stark and cold.

His moody vocals crept over the sounds of clanking pipes, intermittent bursts from an air compressor and the general buzzing of amps and guitar. True industrial drums added a primal pulse to the chaos. But the initially powerful combination eventually grew monotonous.

It didn’t help things when the band ventured into moody and ambient territory, employing sparse tweaks of mainly pre-taped noise. By the end, it hardly mattered that an audience was present.