dEUS

"The Ideal Crash" is an album nobody was expecting.

Certainly not from a band of uncompromising Belgian noise merchants with a cult devotion to Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, and a taste for lopsided, lurching rhythms à-la Tom Waits. Up to that point, in short, dEUS seemed anything but interested in sweet melody. Sure, "Suds & Soda" and "Little Arithmetics" (from their debut "Worse Case Scenario" and follow-up "In A Bar Under The Sea" respectively) held onto a few melodic flourishes here and there, enough to break through on alternative radio stations around the world. But these were white crows in a patchwork of schizoid rhythms, dadaist cabaret moments, jagged violin wails and sonic detonations (Sonic Youth and Pixies being two other passions that Tom Barman and Klaas Janzoons' band never shook off).

Least of all was anyone expecting an album like "The Ideal Crash" in 1999.

The millennium was drawing to a close, and grunge and Britpop, which for better or worse had defined alternative music over the previous decade, had exhausted their expressive potential. Two years earlier Radiohead had released "Ok Computer", definitively steering pop music (at least as far as the mainstream was concerned) toward contamination with electronic music – what happened with their next record is music history. Everything of consequence that followed would therefore be contamination, revivalism (it was precisely between '98 and '99 that Interpol and The Strokes took their first steps), or neatly filed under some subgenre (neo-psychedelia and post-rock were about to enter a true golden age).

In such a fragmented, chaotic context, it would be the band from Antwerp who wrote what we might consider the last great European alternative rock album (in the classic sense of the term) of the century.

After a pair of records as die-hard oddities as "Worse Case Scenario" and "A Bar Under The Sea", "The Ideal Crash" is, to put it mildly, a disorienting listen, one that must have thrown quite a few fans for a loop on first spin at the time. The jagged edges carved out by sudden rhythm shifts had been smoothed over in favor of a fluid, sinuous song structure, and the frantic guitar lines had given way to clear, airy melodies. Klaas Janzoons' violin had stopped being a sharp, unsettling presence and instead began guiding these fairy-tale melodies – the lush embroidery the instrument weaves into the springtime ballad "The Magic Hour" would have been unthinkable just a couple of years earlier, as would the crystalline guitar it dances with.

Even the choice of the enigmatic artwork marked something new; for the first time it wasn't a painting by former band guitarist Rudy Trouvé (a choice likely made following the split with him, who had left the band in 1996 along with bassist Stef Camil Carlens).

For many fans and part of the specialist press, "The Ideal Crash" represented a step backward for the band. And in a sense, from the standpoint of experimentation at least, it was. But it was the necessary sacrifice that allowed for the writing of ten splendid, warm-toned songs (it must have helped that the album was recorded in part in Ronda, in sun-drenched Andalusia), with shifting, richly detailed arrangements drawn from the best of the European progressive tradition, borrowing from it not just certain structures but also some enchanted or futuristic atmospheres. Listening back to it now, one can't help but think that had dEUS been American or British, "The Ideal Crash" would have sold far more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies.

"The Ideal Crash" was disorienting not only for its extreme focus on melody and song form, both unprecedented for the band, but also for the incredible variety of genres and influences (some of them unimaginable) it touches on over the course of an hour of music, to the point that it could be considered a compendium of '90s alternative rock. After all, Tom Barman, the band's principal songwriter (a role he had previously shared with the more extreme Carlens), was very clear about the creative process behind the record: no boundaries. The band went into the studio with ten song sketches and the intention of finding the best possible musical form for each of them, without any limitations whatsoever. That musical form would be found over the course of eight long months of rehearsals, during which the ten songs were recorded and re-recorded in countless guises, until the long-sought perfect result was achieved. In this way, the band's art rock ended up crossing paths with numerous genres, from grunge to futurist pop, from electronica to folk echoes, thus producing (to borrow the title) a perfect crash.

The numerous sonic devices are traded off even within individual songs, which, thanks to an average length of five to six minutes and packed with sudden shifts as they are, come across as prog mini-suites without losing an ounce of pop effectiveness.

"Put The Freaks Up Front" is said to have been shouted by a young George Lucas at his director of photography during the filming of "THX 1138" (his legendary first feature), and it's the title that opens "The Ideal Crash", briefly setting the album down in sci-fi territory. A granite-hard grunge riff, exhausting, constant tempo changes, an enigmatic chorus barked out by Barman and delightfully countered by backing vocals from the rest of the band, while the guitars race by at the speed of light. After the first verse comes the first stroke of genius: a sophisticated jazzy horn interlude is brought in to counterbalance the guitar magma.

Just as cybernetic and overexcited is "Everybody's Weird", its verses driven by a stormy bass line courtesy of Danny Mommens, and separated from one another by an irresistible, retro-obsessed keyboard melody. At the end, amid the sonic frenzy of the guitars, a wild free-jazz saxophone even makes an appearance. More or less what happens at the end of Radiohead's "The National Anthem", only a year earlier and in Belgium. Also vaguely Radiohead-esque are the brushstrokes of acoustic guitar over the electronic backdrop of the ballad "One Advice, Space".

Placed right after "Put The Freaks Up Front", as if to strip the listener of any point of reference with its abrupt change of sound, "Sister Dew" offers yet another unprecedented combination of atmospheres. First a phantasmagoric opening with a little organ openly nodding to Portishead's noir trip-hop, then a driving rhythm built around the snare and a folk arpeggio, and finally a delightful string orchestration from Janzoons. It's a track that sounds very sweet, but carries a bitter, deceptive aftertaste, much like Barman's deeply ambiguous lyrics. Here he's engaged in the recital of a terrible confession, that of a man about whom it's unclear whether he's killed his relationship or his partner (since the person he's addressing is a nun, the "Sister Dew" of the title, we lean toward the second reading). Eros and Thanatos, Eros is Thanatos.

That love is, for dEUS, a complicated, troubled feeling is also borne out by "Magdalena", right from its opening, where a murky hum interferes with the crystalline guitar arpeggio. Track seven on the album is named after one of Barman's exes, with whom he had a stormy relationship, whose contradictions and self-destructive tendencies are recounted in lyrics that spare no details or snatches of conversation. Confused, bitter phrases, very similar to those we've all said or thought in the most fraught moments of our own relationships, and which for that very reason create identification and a powerful connection.

Also deeply intimate is "Let's See Who Goes Down First", a crooked track that harks back to the Waitsian influences of their early records, on which the frontman half-mutters, almost under his breath, about his past suicidal tendencies. Especially striking is the swirl of strings in which the springy guitars mimic the short-circuits of a nervous breakdown.

At the heart of the album we find the title track, an uptempo alternative rock number driven by Julle DeBorgher's blazing drums, and "Instant Street": the most famous dEUS song of all (a title only rivalled, perhaps, by "Suds & Soda") and the zenith of their live shows from then on. It's remarkable, too, that the track with the most complex arrangements of the bunch is also the one with the most immediate, unforgettable melody. The cocky verses drift through an impressionistic landscape sketched out by acoustic guitar and a ringing banjo, alongside the ever-present strings of Janzoons. An idyllic vignette, first the stage for a clash between Barman's swaggering tone and Ward's velvety backing vocals, later destined to be swallowed whole by an incredible closing crescendo. A long, swirling ascent built on the gradual layering of strings and the steadily thickening guitar distortion — in short, one of the most immersive and moving outros of the '90s. Also well worth seeking out is the video, which shows the band and a dance troupe breaking free from an unsettling night-club (the legendary Café d'Anvers) to dance wildly through the streets of Antwerp.

Dreamlike in name and in nature, "Dream Sequence #1" was, according to Tom Barman, inspired by a melody he heard in a dream. True or not, it's hard to believe he actually dreamed it up as rich in detail and unease as it turned out once written and recorded with the help of his trusty second guitarist, Craig Ward. A co-writer on many songs, Ward would leave the band shortly before the follow-up, "Pocket Revolution", an album that would suffer heavily from his absence. Where dEUS had responded to the departures of Trouvé and Carlens with the brilliant reinvention of "The Ideal Crash", they would never fully recover from losing Ward, embarking instead on a solid (at times excellent) but ultimately lesser stretch of their career, one unable to match the peaks they'd hit until then.

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17/03/2019