MERRY XMAL
CHICAGO—The scene is so perfect that it should be out of some damn movie. A dark club with black cinder block walls, a sweaty crowd pressing against the stage, four sullen, stonefaced musicians of mixed gender setting up a throbbing rock pulse fronted by a strikingly beautiful Aryan blonde singer dressed head-to-toe in black, miming and whirling her fists around and singing in German.
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MERRY XMAL
The Beat Goes On
“Ach, tanks! Gut!!”
CHICAGO—The scene is so perfect that it should be out of some damn movie. A dark club with black cinder block walls, a sweaty crowd pressing against the stage, four sullen, stonefaced musicians of mixed gender setting up a throbbing rock pulse fronted by a strikingly beautiful Aryan blonde singer dressed head-to-toe in black, miming and whirling her fists around and singing in German. Any minute you half expect to hear an airraid siren blast the moment apart.
It’s Xmal Deutschland, from Hamburg, doing a late set at Chicago’s Exit. Theirs is a music of rich darkness wrapping itself around a skillful, driving b^at. Everywhere there is noise, lots of scraping and groaning, while Peter Bellendir’s cymbal work helps provide that needed good little bit of subtlety. Singer Anja Huwe, whose voice has the perfect timbre to cut through this din, munches up her German syllables seductively and lets loose with vibrato-less drones stretching out to forever, while Fiona Sangster bangs up synth lines that sound like elementary baroque etudes turned inside out and Manuela Rickers plays her Telecaster nice ’n’ raspy.
A translation of the lyrics would appear to be in order for English-speaking readers (these happen to come from Fetisch, their first LP):
Your body is cold the sun is hot
Caravan picks up your body As they) hang you the sun is high...
Your father doesn’t hear your screaming Your mother doesn’t see your eyes...
Whew! Depressing, huh?
“No it’s not and we don’t think so,” answers Anja. “1 think it’s more melancholic than depressing. It’s aggressive, but it’s very sensitive. It’s positive, y’know? Very positive.”
Xmal Deutschland has actually achieved impressive record sales in Britain without abandoning their native tongue—and though they’re now making their first stab at seeking an American audience, they see no reason to change this policy. Explains Anja, who writes most of the lyrics: “Most of the people think that if you want to be commercial you have to sing in English. But first of all, we don’t want to be a commercial band.”
Anyway, the Xmals don’t seem optimistic about their chances of achieving immense popularity on Yankee turf. “The culture here is just so totally different to anything in Europe,” says Fiona, who grew up in Jamaica and Scotland before settling in Germany. “It’s all so oversized here. Like, you turn on the television, there’s 11 to 20 channels.”
Since they live in West Germany, only a few hundred miles from where U.S. and Soviet war machines eye each other warily over a chasm of mutual dread, the Xmals also get to worry about the cruise missiles our government is planting all over their country like nuclear petunias. “I don’t know, you feel like a pawn,” Fiona sighs. “I mean, you know that if a war ever does start, Germany’s gonna be one of the first places to go”
Anja agrees. “It makes you feel a bit depressed if you really think about it. Everybody’s sort of scared.”
Quoth Fiona upon the subject of our esteemed president: “You get the feeling he’s senile.”
Renaldo Migaldi
