I can clearly remember the first time I saw dEUS on MTV. It was the video for Suds and Soda and the song’s fusion of 90’s indie and screeching Velvet Underground violin just grabbed me. And in just one music video, expanded the mind of poor, startled, teenage me. Their debut album is mostly great but weird, and the follow up, In a Bar, Under the Sea, upped the strangeness levels a lot, but it’s their third album, Ideal Crash, that stands as the band’s best work.
And, to be honest, that’s a bit strange. You see, dEUS had a sound that was uniquely their own. You could hear their influences in places, sure, but you’d never mistake them for anyone else. Yet with the Ideal Crash, out went the jazz samples, out went the spoken word sections and the strange blues influences. With the Ideal Crash, dEUS took their weirdness and put it through a Pavement filter. But melodic Pavement, not weird Pavement. Which is really weird. This should have had everyone screaming sellouts! at the band, but no one did. Ideal Crash is far too good for that. Maybe it’s because even though dEUS changed their sound and sanded off their rough edges, this still sounds like dEUS.
Opening with a blast of feedback, dEUS puts the listener on the back foot from the opening bar. You brace yourself for an assault that never happens. Instead of the wall of noise you expect, you get a great indie rock song with fantastic harmonies, some trumpet and a fun, noisy outro.
The album highlight, Instant Street is, depending on the day, my favourite dEUS song. From the first banjo notes you know that this song is going to be something different. It covers a lot of ground in its six minutes, it has such a great guitar solo and has one of the greatest outros of all time.
The album does get a bit weirder towards the end, and the band’s love of crossing genres sneaks back in. Everyone’s Weird has a great funky bass line and unleashes a horn section for its dissonant jazzy end. Let’s See Who Goes Down First, ends with a wall of noise with that ragged Velvet Underground violin creeping back in.
The greatest trick Ideal Crash plays on the listener is that they never turned their back on being experimental. This album is full of strange arrangements and odd touches that are so seamlessly incorporated into the music that they’re almost invisible. Everything is in service of the song, as it should be.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and proclaim that The Ideal Crash is one of the last great indie albums of the 90’s. It’s melodic, catchy, unusual and a fantastic listen from start to finish. A last gasp 90’s gem in a music world that would soon become lost in the mire of Nu Metal and Retromania.
https://lynkify.in/song/instant-street-remastered/fsEZaQfb
The ways of exile 