Haujobb:

It is always a pleasure to see Haujobb live. I have seen them here in the US previously as well as on their home turf. At the end of this section covering their show with Hocico on November 25th 2002 at the Henry Fonda Music Theatre in Hollywood, there is a link that will take you to our coverage of their show in Leipzig for the Wave Gotik Treffen from the year previous.

The main difference from this current US tour and the last times seeing them live, was the band line-up. Haujobb is based around its primary founding member Daniel Demeyer as always.

Normally he is accompanied by his long-time partner, Dejan as he can be seen in Leipzig. On this tour Daniel was supported by a mix of younger musicians, namely a guitar player, a drummer and a keyboarder (LA's own Mike O. from SEMI and other projects).

Daniel jumped around and swung the mike around while giving an extremely powerful vocal performance. They did a few of the old favorites like Eye over You but there was also a lot of newer material off of Polarity, the newest album.

Haujobb's sound has truly mutated more than evolved as it has gone through so many different life-cycles that one linear evolutionary line is impossible to draw.

I would have to say that the first two albums were so awesome that they still rank up there as my favorite material of Haujobb.

Solutions for Small Planets was an absolutely brilliant album and it was good to hear some material from this one live as well. This album marked the first serious style changes in subtle yet profound ways.

From here, however Haujobb lost me for a while with the more bleak, ambient type almost break-beat dubby stuff like Less and '99. I didn't care for Daniel's voice to be taking such a back seat to the music and the music there was didn't have the power and drive of their other material.

Thankfully Haujobb moved away from this material bringing back the fuller, electronic sound of their past but their style forever mutated by their influences and dabbling in the other genres of electronic music.

The newest album is by far the best thing they have put out in years, containing all of the cyberpunk intelligence and raw energy that attracted me to Haujobb in the first place.

The set had some extremely experimental power electronic pieces in there too that I did not recognize and Daniel did a pretty cool cover of one of Ministry's good era songs that was pretty cool.

I did miss Dejan on guitar and keyboards however, as he is very talented and adds a bit more of the original creative talent to the stage but all in all it was a good show and this venue had very good sound too.

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