Deep Blue Something
Home

THE REVIEW

In 1995, Alice In Chains were winning awards, handed out by the usual music magazines, as the best "classic rock" band... It meant that the formulas, tastes, and perspectives of grunge had already been assimilated in record time. And a year after Kobain’s death, that was already "classical music."

This, however, is (just) a band from those days whose music draws from the eternal pop and rock, starting with a certain preference for semi-acoustic sound, as it was and still is for many other bands. There are also tracks that, in taste and style, seem to come from the Screaming Trees' repertoire, or from certain non-commercial grunge bands. The opening "Gammer Gerten's Needle," entirely instrumental, speaks (sounds) for itself. Or the concluding "Wouldn't Change A Thing": they are not catchy tracks, but they are nonetheless grunge. So take Mark Lanegan and his companions from those times, put their sound through a thousand filters and strainers, and there you have the pop sound of a good piece of this record.

Grunge too are the purring riffs of the guitar in the choruses of their hit "Breakfast At Tiffany's," a well-mannered semi-acoustic tune. Here it is: the songs from "Home" and by Deep Blue Something are well-behaved, courteous, delicate, the choruses are light, even if there’s a somewhat noisy rhythm underneath, and the threads of the verses are very gentle, if not almost banal. But...

The verses of "Halo," with a chorus perfect for breakfasts in any venue, have interesting and dense arrangements. And then that sound of electric guitars seems to emerge from a rock even more classic than grunge, it seems to belong to the dark style of The Cure. In the following track "Josey," the matter becomes more evident: the guitar solos are flat and continuously echoing, and in the specials the vocalist even has the courage to sob the words like Robert Smith!

We are still in the eighties with "A Water Prayer," which sounds like a piece from early Duran Duran, naturally rearranged in an acoustic key; "Song To Make Love To" seems like Echo & The Bunnymen at high speed (and still unplugged); "Red Light" is so acoustic new wave that it sounds like a ballad by New Order from "Get Ready." The kaleidoscopic lullaby "Home," on the other hand, put in the hands of other people, with quite different ambitions one might say, would have been worthy of ending up in "The Unforgettable Fire," or, quite the opposite, in "Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness." And there is even room for a further leap back, that into post-punk, in "Done"...

A band with exceedingly unique arrangements, perhaps due precisely to an excessive desire for palatability in all circumstances and for all audiences. In the end, perhaps because more than a decade has passed, this lean grunge, this acoustic wave, these eighties played by a band from the nineties, these nineties played neither plugged nor unplugged, this music for kids seems pleasant. Provided you don't have what grunge and dark had: pretensions.