dEUS - Belgian-style guitar rock

dEUS (Tom Barman, Stef Kamil Carlens, Klaas Janzoons, Jules De Borgher in the original lineup) formed in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1991, but their debut didn't arrive until 1994 with Worst Case Scenario, an album that immediately earned the band international success, breaking the near-unbreakable Anglo-American monopoly. The dEUS sound is hard to pin down, drawing equally from the past (Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Velvet Underground, jazz) and the present (Nirvana, Pixies, Sonic Youth), but it only takes a listen to “Suds & Soda”, the track that opens the record with a hypnotic violin and an overwhelming chorus, to realize that the band actually possesses a disarming, thoroughly personal sound. Worst Case Scenario is an eclectic record, blending brief, fun interludes (“Shake Your Hip”) with blues madness (“Great American Nude”), aching ballads (“Jigsaw You”) with tracks steeped in jazz (“W.C.S.”), without a single dip or misstep.

The next release, My Sister Is My Clock (1995), is a curious EP recorded in just a few days, made up of a single 25-minute track that is itself built from 13 short pieces strung together by the story of Sergej, a Ukrainian narrating a horror tale. This sort of mini concept-album is far more than a strange experiment: the songs that make it up, though almost always just sketches, are a goldmine of playful, entertaining ideas, utterly free and unconstrained by song form, save for a few exceptions like the fully-formed “Void”, which paradoxically feels out of place within such a singular record.

In A Bar, Under The Sea, the second LP, came out in 1996. Fifteen tracks are perhaps too many, and the miracle of the previous record isn't repeated: overall, the album is certainly less convincing, but that doesn't mean some of the songs aren't absolute masterpieces, starting with the funky, blazing opener “Fell Off The Floor, Man”. “Little Arithmetics” is an utterly perfect ballad. There's no shortage of intriguing, daring moments either (“A Shocking Lack Thereol”, the extraordinary “For The Roses”, “Nine Threads”). “Supermarketsong” and “Memory Of A Festival” are clearly two tongue-in-cheek tributes, the first to easy-listening and the second to the most playful, harmless kind of punk.

Afterward, Stef Kamil Carlens left the band to form one of his own, Moondog Jr. (who would later change their name to Zita Swoon): dEUS, now without Carlens, released The Ideal Crash in 1999, marking a clear turning point from their previous work.

Let's get this straight right away: this third album is certainly less inspired and eccentric than its predecessors, far removed from the dEUS style and lacking that blend of genres that had become their trademark. Some of the sounds, moreover, seem to wink a bit too hard at the fashions of the time, so much so that, listening to them today, they feel prematurely dated.

And yet The Ideal Crash is another masterpiece. Compact, flawless, and home to some of the most beautiful melodies the band ever wrote. Catchy, more conventional, respectful of song form: in a word, pop. Sublime pop, and proud to be so, just as Prefab Sprout were, or Lou Reed's “Transformer”, for instance. It's hard not to fall for songs like “Sister Dew” or “The Magic Hour”, and equally impossible not to get swept up in the crescendo of “Instant Street” or the noisy “Put The Freaks Up Front”. The ten songs that make up the album share an electronic streak and, in some tracks, an almost progressive feel: smoothing out the rough edges and favoring melody, dEUS confirm themselves as one of the greatest, most underrated bands of the Nineties.

Over the following five years, the only dEUS release was a singles collection, No More Loud Music: The Singles, which also features the unreleased “Nothing Really Ends”.

By 2005, all that's left of dEUS is frontman Tom Barman and violinist Klas Janzoons. In the six years since their last album, Barman has hardly been idle: he took part in the electronic project Magnus, releasing an album, “The Body Gave You Everything”, and even directed a film, “Any Way The Wind Blows”.

But it's in 2005, in fact, after a handful of live dates to "test" the new material, that dEUS's fourth, long-awaited album finally sees the light: Pocket Revolution. A nearly perfect, polished record, with some outstanding tracks (the opening ballad “Bad Timing” and “Include me out”, which rank among the best in the band's catalog), yet it leaves you a bit cold, since it lacks the flashes of genius and the lucid madness of earlier records. Even more than on the previous album, dEUS set aside the quirks of their early masterpieces to steer their music onto the more reassuring tracks of pop, and despite a few weaker moments in the middle, they do so with class and skill, letting their unmistakable style shine through here and there. Perhaps dispensable, perhaps the least successful of their career, perhaps a record that sounds like it could have come out years earlier, but nevertheless a small gem that reminds us dEUS are still among us.

Three years later, Vantage Point (2008) plays above all on impact: the powerful, charged, driving riff of “Favourite Game”; the electronic-funk stride of the single “The Architect”; the arena dance-rock of “Oh Your God”, complete with hand claps and rap. Barman wants to keep things simple, but in his own way. The horns disappear, and the arrangements lean more toward a rock-band feel, though they're no less carefully crafted for it (just think of the violins and electric guitars on the ballad “Eternal Woman”). The tracks, flirtatious, sensual, at times dark, often dissolve into melodic turns that are sometimes familiar (“Is a Robot”), sometimes alien (“When She Comes Down”, which recalls the Go-Betweens): always carefully worked out.

Above all, Barman manages to embed his ideas in songs that actually work. Start with the slow one, the enchanted “Eternal Woman”, acoustic guitars and violins, piano notes and a female voice accompanying the chorus. “Popular Culture” is a choral crescendo with a soul undertone, capable of opening hearts to pure joy; “Slow”, which nonetheless squanders the contribution of one of today's finest voices (Karin Dreijer of the Knife), is its rock counterpart. The breakneck “Favourite Game” is a perfect song to blast at full volume; “Smokers Reflect”, a delicate piano ballad reminiscent of Yo La Tengo, stands as proof of a top-tier eclecticism.

Having cut the detours less tied to alt-rock territory, with Keep You Close (2011) the quartet (of the original lineup, only Barman remains, as the band's lyricist and composer) seems intent on reining in the unpredictable burst of colors that had defined its music, moving toward a more firmly rock-oriented dimension. It's no coincidence that the band's guest, in two barely-there cameos, is none other than Greg Dulli, who with his Afghan Whigs followed a path not too far removed from that of the Belgian band.

Emblematic of the renewed dEUS of the 2010s is the title track that opens the record. A cinematic orchestration accompanies Barman's soft voice, so distant and yet so close to the "hallucinated" tone of the mid-Nineties. An airy darkness floods “The Final Blast”, before exploding into rage on “Dark Sets In”, where we find good old Dulli again in the background. “Twice” combines synthetic beats with the band's by-now established love of strings and piano, but then comes “Ghost”, with its melancholic, chart-ready rock, catching us off guard, paving the way for the single “Constant Now”, a pop-rock number with a poorly-digested eighties flavor.

A collapse seems inevitable, but instead the relentless, spoken-word nocturne of “The End Of Romance” welcomes Tom Waits and Nick Cave into Barman's intimate world. The electro temptations barely hinted at on “Second Nature” seem to regurgitate the disarming dance-rock of “The Architect”. But it's the closing track, “Easy”, that makes the album worth the price of admission: hazy synths, faint clattering in the distance, and a delicate piano blend together into a portrait painted in expressionist tones.

An album that shows a band now fully at ease composing sumptuous, refined alt-rock frescoes, but one that has by now lost the schizoid edge of its younger years.

Having finally found line-up stability, just a few weeks after releasing Keep You Close, dEUS went into the studio to work on a follow-up. After just nine months, in June 2012 Following Sea hit the shelves: without aspiring to the avant-rock heights of "Worst Case Scenario" and "In A Bar Under The Sea", the band delivers a chapter (the seventh, not counting a handful of essential EPs) that is at the very least respectable and enjoyable.

The opening is excellent, with "Quatre mains", sung in French and rich with spy-story atmosphere, kicking things off and standing out as the best track on the record. As the album unfolds, though, it suffers from inconsistency, with some strikingly weak moments, such as the unbearable "Crazy About You", which sounds more suited to some hypothetical boy band. The other highlights worth saving are definitely "Hidden Wounds", with an epic finale that recalls the band's finest days, "Nothings", a short, unremarkable ballad, the unexpected and welcome burst of energy of "Fire Up The Google Algorithm", and the convincing closer "One Thing About Waves".

Beyond that, Following Sea comes across as a modest, at times faded work, certainly not the spectacle one would expect from a band that twenty years earlier seemed destined for far greater things. Today the siren call of guitar alt-pop - a touch too polished at that - seems to attract them more than any genuine exploration of sound, and dEUS lose some of their freshness, no longer managing to surprise the listener.

After the anniversary tour marking twenty years of "The Ideal Crash", the band's third, much-lauded album, the Belgian machine got back into gear, and in 2023 How To Replace It came out.

The band is the one from "Following Sea", their last release dating back to 2012, where, compared to the original line-up, only violinist and keyboardist Klaas Janzoons remains alongside Barman. The mandate is to change while staying true to themselves, to find new sounds while keeping the dEUS approach alive - hence a shift in the compositional flow, which returns entirely to the singer, while the group comes together at the arrangement stage, much as it did on their early records.

All this results in a work that is less cohesive than the previous two records, and one that probably bears the marks of its long gestation. The atmospheres are also shaped by the feelings tied to Barman's own passage of age, now in his fifties, and thus less impulsive and more measured. As they say, you're born an arsonist and become a firefighter, but you have to be careful that the water doesn't erode the foundations. The fury and spontaneity of the early days have by now nearly vanished, though it's unclear what will replace them, as the album's title, How To Replace It, seems to suggest.

There's plenty to stir the senses, but the answer remains suspended, left to the listener's judgement. The urge for orchestral openness is there in the solemn timpani driving the propulsion of the opening track, catapulting us into the circles of the damned where you can glimpse the silhouettes of the early Bad Seeds, or in the forceful intro of "Man Of The House", where prog movements and pop openness coexist. There's no shortage of shimmering guitars over the gospel choirs of "Must Have Been New", and the band's usual knack for making its darkest moments memorable, as on the nocturnal r&b of "Dream Is A Giver", or again in the reflections on relationship fallout of the excellent "Love Breaks Down".

Nostalgia, which in a band of fifty-somethings can be a dangerous weapon, lurks around the corner and materializes in "1989", the year the wall fell, but also the year Barman's father died, when he was just seventeen, all of it conjured up through sounds of the era and sung by a Barman chasing a Leonard Cohen-like depth. There are also glimpses, if somewhat faded, of the band's past sound, particularly from the "In a Bar, Under the Sea" period, as on "Simple Pleasures", the result of a jam session with CJ Bolland, a fellow traveller from the Magnus era, or in the Beck/Primal Scream groove of "Why Think It Over (Cadillac)".

As had already happened with "Quatre mains" on the previous album, "How To Replace It" also features a track sung in French. "Le Blues Polaire" is a well-judged shift in mood, its retro charm updated with layers of feedback-drenched guitars, and it could point to a new direction for dEUS going forward. For anyone who had lost track of them or given them up for gone, "How To Replace It" proves that dEUS are still very much in the game, even if the album isn't exactly an easy, immediate listen, running a touch too long with some tracks struggling to take flight. We're fairly certain that the freshness and brilliance of the Nineties are a miracle unlikely to be repeated, but we hope the Belgian band can still surprise us. So faith in dEUS is still alive. We wait, hopeful.

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