Track Listing

1. When She Comes Down
2. Oh Your God
3. Eternal Woman
4. Favourite Game
5. Slow
6. Architect
7. Is a Robot
8. Smokers Reflect
9. Vanishing Of Maria Schneider
10. Popular Culture

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2329 in Music
• Released on: 2008-04-28
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Limited Edition

Customer Reviews

Belgians bounce back boldly...
After a seven year hiatus in 1999, Belgian quintet Deus have been very busy in the last 3 years and this their fifth album vies with "The Ideal Crash" as their most commercial work.

The husky vocals remain the same, entwined with moments of delightful melody and then abrasive noise but this is a trademark of the Deus brilliance which all fans have come to love and cherish.

The guitar work of Mauro Pavlovski is very impressive as the ten tracks sweep by in a majestic arc. Karin Drejer of The Knife provides backing vocals on the title track and horns and strings flesh out the basically Beefheartian sounds of the band.

Tom Barman has written some of his best tunes for a decade,Deus deserve to be up there with any of the major exports from Antwerp over the last 500 years or so.....buy this and breathe in the slightly off-kilter breeze of the Euro-leftfield.

dEUS should play at Glastonbury
dEUS should have the opportunity to play on Glastonbury festival. dEUS will play on the Werchter Festival this summer on the 6th of July. I hope that people from the UK will discover dEUS which is for me a top band. Already active for about 20 years and with a lot of nice tracks.
Tom Barman is a talented guy not only for music but also as a cineast see the movie Any Way the Wind Blows.
Respect Mr. Barman. We're proud of you. Only 36 years old and you achieved a lot more then others already did.

Belgium's finest
Back in the days of Britpop you could have been excused for thinking we were the only country making music worth listening to; but you'd have been wrong. Along with Trappist ales and steel Belgium were exporting some excellent music in the form of dEUS whose 1999 album The Ideal Crash I still play regularly. The follow-up Pocket Revolution was quietly released in 2005 and was a bit of a disappointment if I'm honest. Does new album Vantage Point see a return to form?

Things get off to a good start with When She Comes Down, filled with the kind of grandeur you might expect, keyboards coming in to augment the instrumentation. Oh Your God comes at you much harder; reverbed guitars, punchy drums and hand claps and spoken vocals which soar into a big chorus. Eternal Woman is a beautiful ballad, with dreamy female backing vocals from Lies Lorquet of fellow Belgian band Mintzkov, which reminds me of some of their earlier work. Things darken again with Favourite Game's grungy sounding sinister guitars and chanted chorus. Slow starts well, featuring guest vocals from The Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson, before descending into prog rock territory and a rather robotic sounding chorus and the album's other big track, The Architect, takes Buckminster Fuller, who developed the geodesic dome (think The Eden Project) amongst other things, as it's unlikely protagonist but it's multi voiced chorus makes them sound worryingly like a boy-band. Is A Robot has some of the extended instrumentals that made The Ideal Crash such a great album. That album also benefited from its quieter, thoughtful moments and Smokers Reflect is another great example of what dEUS do well. Guy Garvey from Elbow lends his vocals to The Vanishing of Maria Schneid another powerful track. Closer, Popular Culture has a similar grandeur to the albums beginning, a singalong chorus featuring what sounds like a children's choir but featuring some of the worst scanning lyrics I've ever heard.

All in all it's a mixed bag. dEUS have always been a genre bending band and how much you like this album may depend on which dEUS you prefer. Personally I could have done with more of the beauty and less of the bombast, but after several changes of line-up it's gratifying to see the band filled with confidence again.