Anja Huwe's return on stage is something we wouldn't have dared dream of a year ago. The former lead singer of Xmal Deutschland had hung up her boots thirty-five years earlier after the West German gothic outfit's fourth album, devoting the rest of her artistic creation to painting. Her comeback last year with a debut solo album entitled Codes gave us hope of seeing her live again: she did just that on 9 February with this concert at La Marbrerie in Montreuil, the second of her tour after her appearance at Grauzone Fest. We're even more excited to see that Selofan will be opening the evening: over the last dozen years or so, we've had plenty of opportunities to appreciate the quality of the Greek darkwave duo's compositions and staging. This line-up brings together two great generations!
Selofan
Selofan have built up a global aesthetic, both musical and visual: their music, which draws on gothic theatricality, the icy minimalism of coldwave and the martial repetitiveness of industrial, is combined with elaborate imagery, which can be in black and white or full of colour, but which always aims to distort reality so that it can be invaded by emotion. It may seem contradictory, but Selofan shows us a frozen emotion that freezes us and draws us in. As always, the screen behind the stage displays a mixture of images taken from the Hellenic band's video clips, which are often blatantly Expressionist in inspiration. The duo always present this contrast between Joanna with extravagant looks, in this case blue in her outfit and on her face with a new haircut, singing with eloquent expressions and gestures, and the discrete Dimitris behind his black glasses, who holds the bass most of the time but sometimes takes over the vocals. Selofan's music is like that too: the implacable coldness of the drum machine and the heaviness of the bass contrast with the desperate calls of the vocals and the warmer musical touches such as the occasional saxophone.
This time, the Athenians come first to defend their latest album Animal Mentality (review). Bluebirds and its binary rhythms get us moving straight away, and other danceable tracks from the album follow; but the tone changes when Dimitris takes over on vocals for tracks full of contained pain, Lucille and above all the magnificent Sacrifice Me... This seventh album also won us over on stage. Selofan then returned to their previous albums, and once again surprised us with the renewal of their setlist: the hit Love is a Mental Suicide is not present this time, instead we see Shadowmen from the Cine-Romance album or Tristesses resurface; Στο Σκοτάδι (Sto Skotadi in Latin alphabet, ‘In the darkness’) from the eponymous album replaces the classic Wheels of Love and we revel in it, the track has a poignant heaviness live. As is often the case, however, it's with the hits from the Vitrioli album that we reach the peak of their spellbinding power: Ist Die Liebe Tot? and its desperate hammering, Billie Was A Vampire, whose title track sounds like a light-hearted joke but whose icy loneliness and despair on Give Me A Reason we take very seriously. For the space of a very fine hour, we were totally immersed in the band's universe.
Anja Huwe
What we didn't know until that evening was what an Anja Huwe concert in 2025 would sound like. The blonde iconic singer of Xmal Deutschland was accompanied by her returning accomplice Mona Mur on keyboards - she was heard for the first time in a long time on her album Delinquent in 2019, and contributed to the compositions of Codes. Manuela Rickers, the ex-guitarist from Xmal Deutschland who also contributed to the album, is not on stage: the other members of the line-up are bassist Olaf Boqvist, guitarist Drew Richards and drummer Christian St. Claire, as announced by Anja Huwe on Instagram. While the screen accompanies the band with impressively shadowy images, the music grabs us in a warmer way than Selofan's: it's the guitars and drums that take over here, in a heavy, incisive style.
We quickly realise that while Anja Huwe is here to defend her solo album, it's the songs from Xmal Deutschland that are taking centre stage. So much the better: we really wanted to see them. Anja Huwe presents them in a modern interpretation, with moods heavier than we expected, the electronics and drums creating a heavy atmosphere. The concert kicks off with the anthem Boomerang, taken from Xmal Deutschland's debut album Fetisch, followed by Geheimnis from the same album. The singer's voice and body language were abundantly expressive, and she was visibly reinvigorated by the energy of her old songs. It was after these two tracks that we began to discover the Codes album live, first through Living in the Forest, whose tormented atmosphere immediately appealed to us. The following tracks from the same album -Pariah, Exit, Rabenschwarz- continue this exploration, at slower tempos than those used by Xmal Deutschland and with more varied sounds. We like them a lot and, to tell you the truth, we have the feeling that we underestimated them a little on the record, where we sometimes found it hard to get into the mix, especially when we talk about Rabenschwarz.
The rest of the concert was mainly devoted to songs from Xmal Deutschland's second and third albums, Tocsin and Viva, which are more melodic. They are less dark and heavy, but we love the heady refrains of Eisengrau, Polarlicht and Augenblick. But there's also Allein, recently resurrected from the shadows thanks to the compilation Early Singles (1981-1982) (review), a jubilant, rugged anthem. We end on a high note with the fantastic Incubus Succubus, the band's historic hit, here reinterpreted with more electronics, and the unstoppable Qual from Fetisch, as beautiful as a thunderstorm.
Well, that wasn't really the end of the story. Or was it? Well, it's complicated. There's an encore, of course, and Anja Huwe and her bandmates are back with gusto, except that Mona Mur's keyboard is clearly doing as it pleases when the musician tries to follow on from the last track on the set; after several unsuccessful attempts to get it to comply, the band finally decide to play Allein again, where it's easier to do without its cooperation. Well then, we're back to enjoying this song from the catacombs! And we can only hope that Anja Huwe will soon be back to play her songs in full and in such good company.
