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Deus shake off their indie image
New album : Vantage Point
Paris
28/04/2008 -
Deus’s boisterous frontman Tom Barman claims to be exhausted after a marathon round of promotion. But he still seems to have enough energy to speak fast and loud (in impeccable French), banging his fist on the table to emphasize every other remark. "I’m someone who just naturally has a lot of energy", Tom says by way of understatement, explaining how for many long years that energy was pumped into settling quarrels within the band. "When I think about the huge amount of energy I’ve put into defusing fraught situations, calming things down and trying to keep certain people happy... Well, let’s just say I’ve wasted too many years of my life on that and I’m only just beginning to understand just how much now!"
Tom Barman speaks as sole survivor (together with Deus’s mad fiddler Klaas Janzoos) of the band’s original line-up. And he appears to be feeling the weight of that history now. Deus originally got together in Antwerp in the early 1990s and have lived several different lives in their two-decade existence. After being one of the founding forces of Belgium’s indie rock scene in 1994 with their phenomenal album Worst Case Scenario and the indie hit Suds and Soda, the band went on to lose five members including lead singer Stef Kamil Carlens (who went off to form another cult Belgian outfit, Zita Swoon). Nevertheless, Deus still went on to make their mark on the European music scene with their unique mix of pop-rock, free jazz and ‘noise’ experimentation.
Serenity and stability
There is no denying, though, that compared to Worst Case Scenario and Ideal Crash, Vantage Point has a much more controlled feel to it. None of the tracks on the album are allowed to run beyond four minutes. And the first single release, The Architect, even has a danceable Prince-sounding edge to it. "We wanted a real white funk sound on it, like Talking Heads", says Tom. "We didn’t use any kind of electro samples on the track, either. Everything was played loop by loop. We spent hours going over and over it until we got the structure right."
Apart from this playful incursion into groove, the remainder of Deus’s new album is dominated by rock, a rock that is precision-crafted to perfection on Slow, the most outstanding track on Vantage Point. "We came up with that track with all of us working together in a moment of pure magic", says Tom. "And that’s the song I’m proudest of here." Justifiably so, but things get a little shaky when Deus attempt to go pop ballad. While the radio-friendly Eternal Woman (a duet with Lies Lorquet from the Belgian group Mintzkov) proves that Deus are absolute masters of melody, Popular Culture, which overdoes the sentimental pop ballad to a ridiculous extreme, is something of a flop.
A bid for popularity
And here we hit upon the nub of Deus’s problem. How are the "new look" Deus going to reconcile their taste for sonic buzz and free rock - on which they built their reputation in the past - with their current quest for the perfect pop single? "I’d like us to be a lot more popular than we are now", admits Tom. "I hate the fact that Deus are sometimes categorized as a cult band. We’ve sold over a million albums in fifteen years, but that’s not enough. What do I think our greatest weakness is? The fact that we’ve been so eclectic in the past! We’ve done things like put out a pure pop single one minute then done a follow-up that ends with an earth-shattering rock finale. That hasn’t exactly helped us become a commercial success!"
So should fans expect Deus to move towards a more formatted type of pop track some time soon? Tom fervently denies this. "I’m not really interested in all that any more", he says, "I love pop, but what I want to do now is move towards compositions that are a bit less classic. I want to progress towards a more collective way of working". So does this mean a return to the long experimental improvisations of their the band’s early days? "No, we’ve done too many tracks where we went off into mad improvisations at the end and too many jam sessions that were basically bad concerts… What I’d like to do now is wipe out the past altogether and start afresh." But the author of the legendary Little Arithmetics reassures us : "There’ll still be a wild and free side to our live performances. That side of Deus will never totally disappear!"
Nor it appears will Deus’s aura of controversy. The band and their record label, Universal Music, are currently involved in a dispute with two national Belgian newspapers, Le Soir and De Morgen. Both papers deliberately broke an embargo they signed with Universal Music, printing an interview with Tom Barman two days before the agreed publication date. The public breaking of the embargo was a protest against the 25,000 € fine Universal Music threatened journalists with should they not respect the contract. Deus, it appears, look set to be in the news for some time to come!
Deus will be appearing at ‘Les Eurockéennes’ festival in Belfort on 4 July
Jérôme Pichon
Translation : Julie Street
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