Tuxedomoon

Preceded by an unusually feverish sense of anticipation, one capable of intriguing even the most skeptical and those furthest removed from the cult of devotion to the wonders of new wave, the Tuxedomoon concert filled the Palamazzola almost to capacity.

The entrance suggested a certain indifference, later disproved by the crowd, motivated in various ways to attend the event. To speak of a dominant trend within the audience would understate the sheer variety of the crowd, but those who, true to a musical taste elevated to a way of life, were bound to be there, were indeed there. What happened shortly after astonished everyone: utterly self-assured, they took the stage without much fuss, triggering the customary roar. They smile, wave, and get ready to play.

“Waltz”, something of an ideal watershed moment in the band's career, opens cautiously, continuing into the syncopated divertissement of “Luther Blisset”, sung by the eclectic Steven Brown, with the trumpet of longtime, warmly Teutonic accomplice Luc Van Lieshout, and “illustrated” on the big screen by George Kakanakis, who creates and projects pulsating letters live, right up to the final frenzy of furiously tearing pages from a book and hurling them at the audience just as the shock begins to set in.

If Steven Brown comes across as an amiable, languid elf of the occult, equally inspired on sax, keyboards and piano, the mesmerizing, alluring, provocative Blaine Reininger, on “Here Till X-Mas”, breaks up his crooner vocals by playing the violin with his teeth, and this cannot help but hopelessly captivate the audience's attention, immediately rewarded with the performance of a classic: “And now something from the past, from history… ‘Desire’”, Blaine announces in his slightly surreal Italian. And it's the triumph of Peter Principle's bass, devilish, impeccable, menacingly static, over Steven's nervous, obsessive vocals, trembling with unease, and over Blaine's superb violin embroidery; the big screen fills with paganism, iconoclasm, a nihilistic and distorting simultaneous footage of angels pierced by arrows, hieratic female faces disfigured by dark mustaches, alternating with the director's hand exploring the stage, right down to the Barbie doll which, true to the metaphor, hides her gaze.

To keep the spell from fading, the band returns to “Cabin In The Sky”, with the mocking “Diario di un Egoista”, a piece of theater of the absurd performed by Blaine in a courtship game between two masks, representing the male and the female, a game suspended on the edge of narcissism, and broken by the languid, sadistic final farewell in the usual irresistibly roguish Italian, “Ciao, ciao bellezza”.

Starting with “This Beast”, the mood turns sulfurous: Steven sings of the devil over images of dreadful heresy pulsing to the refrain “devil inside”, while the director once again films his own hand which, at the same time, tears pages from the sheet on which he had written, as if it were an obituary, “Parole Morte”.

Peter's bass recalls the refined unease of "Loneliness," whose apocalypse is embodied by photos of a bygone marital happiness, its face lost in a hole of flames.

In the encore, a generous run of some 20 minutes, the erudite esotericism that seems to underpin the art of Tuxedomoon unfolds in the symbolism serving as context/video for "Courante Marocaine": little men/priests, in a line, climb a deceptive staircase which, mounted upside down, leads to hell rather than the kingdom of heaven, while Blaine's voice turns into an Arabic hiss like a muezzin.

Our descent into the underworld, rendered with dreamlike, uneasy visionary detail in every single groove, comes to an end, leaving behind days thick with disorienting flashbacks, untouched by unforgiving time.

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