It must have left British audiences scratching their heads and many mouths agape when Xmal Deutschland, fresh from the Hamburg underground scene, opened for the Cocteau Twins in the early 1980s. It wasn’t just the incomprehensible German lyrics that must have been irritating, but also the pathos-filled performance of singer Anja Huwe, who is said to have been a real phenomenon on stage. The jagged staccato rhythms, the undercooled bass and the cutting guitars are clearly reminiscent of British role models such as Joy Division, but Xmal Germany have their very own approach to dark post-punk and a special charm that lies precisely in their clarity and single-mindedness.
Gift now combines the first two albums Fetisch and Tocsin, which were created in just two years and released on 4AD, together with five EP tracks from the same period. This is interesting not only as a pure time capsule, but also as a starting point for the search for traces of influences on explicitly female musicians, since Xmal Deutschland was (at least initially) an all-female band. In any case, a relatively obscure band from Hamburg helped wrest the DIY ethos of punk from the boys and also influenced the emerging gothic scene.
