Antwerp band dEUS \u2013 built around the core of Tom Barman and Klaas Janzoons \u2013 started out as a very interesting band. They fully leaned into the anything-goes sector of 90s music where the likes of Beck, Beastie Boys, Bj\u00f6rk, Moloko and Super Furry Animals kicked away genre fences and got their weird on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later, they got a bit Big Indie, with big, sweeping, widescreen songs that put them closer to Doves and Elbow and guaranteed them nice festival slots. Significantly less interesting, but packed with accomplishment and emotional heft, and definitely deserving of ongoing success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, though, over a decade since their last album, they\u2019ve gone interesting again. And, fantastically, not by going backwards. Well, OK, a little bit: \u201cSimple Pleasures\u201d here is very much in the Beck\/Beasties\/Moloko trippy white funk<\/a> mould, and it\u2019s a lot of fun. But mostly this album takes their widescreen later identity onwards and outwards. Where dEUS\u2019s middle period albums were fundamentally indie<\/a> rock<\/a>, they\u2019ve now taken their emotional core and found way richer and shinier ways to express it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Barman does a lot of spoken vocals on this record, and in doing so explicitly references Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Smog\u2019s Bill Calahan and the Pet Shop Boys\u2019s Neil Tennant. And the music brings in a lot of synthesisers, a lot of pianos, a lot of shiny production, recalling the grand scope of 80s bands like Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout. The songs are abstracted, but constantly refer to time passing, great spaces traversed, loss and longing on both a personal and global scale, and they back that up with their writing and production. It\u2019s sophisticated yet it really delivers some gut punches \u201cright in the feels\u201d as the obsolete slang goes, and a truly impressive maturation for a band more than 30 years into their existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Posted from: https:\/\/theartsdesk.com\/new-music\/album-deus-how-replace-it<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n