dEUS – Past and Present…

When Tom Barman put his group dEUS on hold in 2000, he only imagined it would be a short break, for the members to pursue extra-curricular activities. Barman would spend the early 00s recording as Magnus with techno producer CJ Bolland, and directing his acclaimed debut feature, Any Way The Wind Blows. “We were all busy, those years flew by,” he laughs. “But afterwards, we realised that, in rock music, that many years out is like an eternity. The response we enjoyed when we returned was unbelievable… That people remembered us, and came to the shows, and that we were playing to larger audiences, in many places, than before we took that break... It was more than we could ever have expected.” But then, as dEUS’s storied career has always taught us, it pays to expect the unexpected.

The story began in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1992, and a small but vibrant and incestuous alternative music scene, where each musician was as likely to be in five bands as one. A mutual love of all things alternative and underground melded five talented musicians and performers into dEUS.  A band that spent the next six years producing a body of work that, chameleon-like, shifted through an array of musical styles and tones, a dazzling kaleidoscope that was eternally, indisputably and umistakably dEUS’s own.

Their debut, 1994’s Worst Case Scenario, greeted an unsuspecting world with the gonzoid punk chant of ‘Suds & Soda’, the off-kilter pop sensibilities of ‘Via’, the elegantly turbulent heart-break of ‘Hotellounge (Be The Death Of Me)’. This was followed in 1996’s with In A Bar Under The Sea, produced by Eric ‘Drew’ Feldman, a Captain Beefheart Magic Band veteran who had also played in PJ Harvey's band and The Pixies, who nurtured the band’s grand ambitions. By the time Barman and co recorded 1999’s The Ideal Crash the chorus of approval the group enjoyed now included the praise of REM and Radiohead.

dEUS played a handful of special shows during their downtime – including a handful of gigs in June 2002, promoting singles collection No More Loud Music – but it wasn’t until a spate of performances before the Christmas of 2004 that their return became a concrete reality, with the promise of a new studio album, their fourth, the following year. “The mindset wasn’t, Oh, here’s the dEUS ‘comeback’,” remembers Barman. “It was more, Let’s go back to work.” The end result “Pocket Revolution” was a confident and assured return that reminded us all just how much we’d missed dEUS while they were gone.

Following a year of sell-out shows, Barman and his bandmates felt energized enough to go straight back to work. They woodshedded from September 2006 through to the Spring of 2007, writing and rehearsing their new material, before building a new studio in a converted apartment. The studio was called Vantage Point, and of course went on to become the title of the album, which featured Guy Garvey from Elbow and Karin Dreijer Andersson from The Knife.

Energised by the response to their live shows, emboldened by building Vantage Point, the album that followed was the band’s most exciting to date, Barman and his bandmates stretching themselves further and remaining, as ever, profoundly adventurous. “After a while, you get tired of singing about yourself,” smiles Barman, of the songs that make up Vantage Point. “On songs like ‘Slow’ and ‘The Architect’, I’m writing stories about other people, which I’ve never tried before. I interviewed Nick Cave the other day, for Belgian TV, and he’s one of my heroes. And he said, ‘It’s too easy to write about yourself’, and that’s so true. It’s exciting to try new ideas, that’s always been at the heart of this band.”

dEUS are currently in their Antwerp studio finishing their new album ‘Keep You Close’ which will be released in September 2011. Recorded with Canadian producer David Bottrill (Muse, Placebo, Tool a.o.), it is the band’s first release since ‘Vantage Point’ in 2008. ‘Keep You Close’ is also the title of one of the songs on the album.

According to Barman, the album is “very passionate, but danceable. If ‘Vantage Point’ was a vodka redbull, ‘Keep You Close’ is a mojito.”