Kraftwerk's '70s electropop still sounds as modern as ever

Stepping into Stage AE on the North Shore on Friday night felt like taking a time machine back to the 1970s — just with way better sound and cooler visuals.

Kraftwerk has been playing their revolutionary electronic music for more than five decades, and they’re probably the most influential band you may not have heard of. They fomented their brand of at-the-time-unusual instrumentation in West Germany in the early 1970s before recording a series of successful albums that helped to shape a variety of musical genres. Listening to the tour of their catalogue on Friday, bits of Depeche Mode, Devo, ’90s house and hip-hop artists and even Coldplay were easy to pick out of the melodies and bass lines.

In fact, midway through the set — somewhere around the hard-hitting “The Man-Machine” — it occurred to me that this felt like every parody of German music that’s showed up in pop culture over the past several decades. Except that Kraftwerk isn’t responding to those stereotypes — they’re the reason they exist in the first place.

This was the second stop of their Multimedia tour, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of their seminal album “Autobahn.” There were a couple of technical hiccups, but when your whole show — and your light-up suits — are electronic, that’s bound to happen now and then.

Promptly at 8 p.m., the group’s four current members took the stage, each positioned behind a podium that lit up — in color coordination with the projection screen behind them and the grid of lights piping their matching suits. A vocoder-enhanced voice boomed from the sound system to greet the audience; it would be the most communication the band would have with the crowd all night. Keeping with their nearly robotic personas, the quartet was not talkative at all.

Each song had corresponding visuals, hence the Multimedia tour name. “Numbers,” the set’s opener, was accompanied by a scroll of “The Matrix”-esque green numerals onscreen to accompany its catchy drum machine beat and snyth melodies.

Several of Kraftwerk’s songs felt very much of their time — the Cold War was highly evident in the sparse lyrics of songs including “Computer World” and the driving show highlight “Radioactivity,” which featured the sound of a Geiger counter. Even in German, words about living in the “atomic age” come through loud and clear.

Technology has certainly enhanced these songs, allowing the band’s four members to more intricately and cleanly layer melodies with a wide and varied sound palette. This was obvious on songs such as “It’s More Fun To Compute,” where the sound palette matched the colorful visual palette of moving mosaic blocks on the screen.

To celebrate the anniversary of “Autobahn,” they performed the title track, which is 22 minutes long on the LP and has several movements. Breaking from the somewhat rigid beats of their other songs, “Autobahn” is bouncy and sunny, and integrates the noises of car horns, radio static and other nostalgic driving sounds.

Some of those lengthy, repetitive and wordess tunes could get a bit old, though, as with a medley of songs from their 2003 album “Tour de France Soundtracks.” While the songs utilized some fun tricks, like emulating the breathing patterns of a cyclist in the midst of exertion, they went on for a bit too long in the same style.

The visuals added plenty to the music. In the airy “Spacelab,” the audience got to watch as a UFO landed right outside Stage AE in Pitttsburgh. “Computer Love” — with a melody recognizably sampled in Coldplay’s “Talk” — featured an undulating pink airwave on the screens. And the softer, more conventional pop song “Neon Lights” featured, well, neon lights.

“Trans-Europe Express,” one of Kraftwerk’s most popular songs, helped to close the pre-encore set. With the scrape and blare of train tracks and horns woven in, this 1976 song clearly paved the eventual way for industrial music. It also sounded so much like a 1980s movie score that I half expected a young Matthew Broderick to show up among the projections.

After the briefest of pre-encore breaks, the band returned to play a trio of catchy tunes that all seemed to convey the general aura of Kraftwerk: the first was literally called “The Robots” and featured a gloriously poppy beat and plenty of heavily digitalized vocals. The more atmospheric “Planet of Visions” followed, and they ended with the pump-it-up combo of “Boing Boom Tschak” and “Musique Non Stop.”

At the end of the show, the members of the band left the stage one by one, each taking some time to solo before their exit to show off their own styles and contributions. With a final “Auf Wiedersehen,” the last of the legendary group left his podium and the lights blinked out one final time.