It doesn't speak well of their laughably inanimate stage presence, but it says a lot about Kraftwerk's concert Wednesday night in Minneapolis that one of the most joyous and colorful moments came when the band members weren't on stage at all.
That fun, impersonal bit came three-quarters of the way through the ever-quirky but ultra-charming two-hour performance at the State Theatre — only the third time the German electronic-music pioneers have hit the Twin Cities since resurfacing in the 1990s. In that time, Kraftwerk's reputation as innovators rose enough to land them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year as an early influencer.
They still will never be mistaken as rock stars, though. As was the case at their Northrop Auditorium date in 2015, the band handed out 3D glasses at the door and relied on retro 3D video and graphics to liven up the show visually. Actual robots pitched in again, too.
As the familiar bleepy and bloopy sounds of the 1978 classic "The Robots" started up, the band members were replaced by four animatronic robots dressed in matching red-and-black uniforms. The stand-ins proceeded to awkwardly sway and swivel to the retro-futuristic groove — way more movement than Kraftwerk themselves ever put forth.
The Gen-X music nerds on hand cheered on the robots like toddlers greeting the house band at a Chuck E. Cheese. But the 2,000 fans also showed plenty of love for the real musicians, especially enigmatic composer and vocalist Ralf Hütter, the one Kraftwerk member left from the group's inception Germany's arty krautrock scene of the early-1970s
Hütter and his bandmates spent the rest of the concert standing behind four uniformly shaped, neon-lit stands. Those podiums may have held super-exotic synthesizers and hi-fi drum machines or just a couple "press play" buttons; it was hard to tell and didn't really matter anyway.
The co-founder of the group also sang here and there. Hütter donned a robotic vocal effect on his microphone early in the show during "Computer World," and later he came across like an emotionless Bryan Ferry later in "Neon Lights" and "Autobahn," the latter accompanied by backdrop video of an old Volkswagen Bug rolling down the road in lo-fi '80s computer graphics.
Even though Wednesday's show featured nearly all the same songs and visual effects as the prior Northrop gig — including identical opening and closing tunes, "Numbers" and "Musique Non Stop" — it was unique and creative enough in the first place to feel far from routine.
The concert was also unusually vibrant on the sonic front. Repetitively grooving classics like "The Model" and "Tour de France" and a crescendoing new piece called "Airwaves / Tango" would have generated a sea of dancing if not for the theater seats and the audience staring hypnotically at all the 3D effects. Alas, though, only the robots danced at this one.
