dEUS
The Ideal Crash

The year of our Lord 2003 is drawing to a close, marking nearly half a decade of silence from dEUS, since the Belgians' last effort still bears the date of far-off March '99. Back then, with little to no buzz and equally lackluster promotional efforts from Universal, one of the underground masterpieces of the past decade came to light, the "Ideal Crash" that fell short—and its impact can never truly be grasped—of the expectations of those (not few) who were first struck by the feverish "Worst Case Scenario" and subsequently by the less incisive and more sprawling "In A Bar Under The Sea."

A sharp departure from the past, "The Ideal Crash" compresses within the short span of 10 tracks the urgency of the talented and visionary leader Tom Barman to experiment with sounds, despite the evident technical limits due to the—too many—line-up changes that in recent years cut down the historical core (and what if the schizophrenic and oblique side of the early works was the result of Stef Camil Karlens's sick mind, now with Zita Swoon?).

Left alone, Barman invents—in 8 months of recordings on the brink of madness, with grueling 15-hour practice sessions each day and only a few days of relative peace—a record of definitive rupture, a nervous hybrid of Massive Attack pulsations (“Let's See Who Goes Down First”), Radiohead-like epicness (“One Advice, Space”), electroclash electronic grafts (“Everybody's Weird”), and grunge fury (the initial “Put The Freaks Up Front”).

"We had the drafts of these 10 songs, and from there we moved in no other direction but to create the best sound for each of them. I wanted these 10 songs to hit from the speakers like a punch in the stomach" (Tom Barman).

As far as I am concerned, I devoured the grooves of this work until I stripped it to the bone, in the frenzy typical of youthful loves, those—which, to be clear, won't return—that carry with them the delicate melancholy of the right days that have passed.

Having abandoned the crosswise madness of their early works, dEUS crafted their vision of the perfect pop song, damnably normal yet inevitably ahead, both in terms of the typical standards of the time and as a courageous artistic act on its own. In the folds of “Magdalena” or the marvelous “Sister Dew” flows the blood and sweat of someone who demanded for themselves—albeit in a risk, alas confirmed—to travel the less trodden path, for those who play and for those who listen. And it's for this reason, too, that we are different (W. Whitman dixit).