dEUS.be has just announced a couple of extra festivaldates.
I've updated the tour overview and the tourmap with the latest info.
dEUS will open the NME-stage of the T in the Park-festival in Balado, Kinross-shire (Schotland) on Saturday July 12th.
A Last.FM-event says dEUS is playing the Rockwave-festival in the Terra Vibe-parc near Athens (Greece) on July 8th. Articles in the Greek press seems to confirm this date. Other bands on the bill that day include The Offspring, Flogging Molly and Marky Ramone. The official website of the festival can be found here.
A (very small) interview with Tom. Tom says they love to play in France since they've noticed they've got a new, younger fanbase in that country.
Studio Brussel aired a Top 90 of the 90's today. It's no surprise that dEUS was a couple of times in the list. Smells like teen spirit (Nirvana) made it to the top, but dEUS had 3 songs in the top 10.
2. Suds & Soda
6. Instant Street
8. Roses
23. Hotellounge
58. Little Arithmetics
An overview of The Architect in the Belgian charts this week
On the We Have No Zen blog you can download the entire session Tom Barman recorded with Guy Van Nueten in 2003 at Studio Toots in Brussels (hit the "Toot it" link below the picture).
Playlist: Pink Moon / River / Magdalena / Louisiana 1927 / Memory of a Free Festival / Instant Street / Magnolia / Serpentine / Nothing Really Ends / My Funny Valentine / Harry, Irene
Spanish webzine MondoSonoro gives Vantage Point 4 stars out of 5. Here's a (machine?) translation of their review, courtesy of ISRC member Elviejito:
Fortunatelly, this time we had only to wait for a couple of years to meet again with the one that adds the fifth work of study of our favorite Belgians. And also it is a luck that their new album not only is at the level of the previous one if not that, for moments, even overcomes it on having obtained a collection of much more cohesive songs about a style in which the instrumental know-how is to the service of achieving the suitable atmosphere.
A tonal density that in occasions there shows himself worrying with this kind of soul darkness and this evident touch arty with whom so good results there have harvested pioneers like the Bad Seeds, Tom Waits or other related bands like The Afghan Whigs, And You Will Know Us By You Trail Of Dead or Gomez. To all the these ones, the cd begins with " When She Comes Down " whose funky and negroid oscillation remember other Colossuses of the nineties, Fun Lovin ' Criminals, but similarities dissapear with the epic touch of the refrain. Following " Oh Your God " had signed it proud Nick Cave and, after this one, a "Eternal Woman" that evokes the rereading that Johnny Cash did of NIN's "Hurt".
Nevertheless, the best thing comes towards the half of the disc with a "Slow" that could be signed by Greg Dulli's song-book and a single, "The Architect", with this touch of modernity post-punk (The Raptures?). To finish a pearl of indie-soul coral called " Popular Culture " with which they endto this catalogue of the nineties rock.
A bunch of release dates have just popped up on dEUS.be.
Vantage Point will be released on April 18 on the European continent, on April 25 in the UK & Ireland and on May 21 in Japan. But the digital release will be on April 14 in Europe, on the 18th in Belgium and on the 21st in the UK. Nothing yet about the American release date.
Slow and The Architect will be released on a single disc (a "double A-side").
Found on the Vantage Point product page at Amazon.de: this promotional video for the album, with the band rehearsing Bad Timing, a part of the Slow video, and a message to "girls & boys" by Tom.
"hello girls & boys! i'm tom barman, from deus. we're recording our new album, vantage point, in this studio, in antwerp, belgium. we're bringing it out on april 18th. we hope you like it as much as we do. bye bye!"
The rumour was right: dEUS will headline the Motel Mozaique festival in Rotterdam, on April 11. They'll play at Off_Corso. Beware: in order to see the concert, you'll need to get a wristband from 16:00 on the same day at the Motel Mozaique tent on Schouwburgplein.
Motel Mozaique organiser Harry Hamelink is honoured to have dEUS on the bill: "dEUS have built up quite a status in Europe, and still they're coming back to Motel Mozaique. We're not calling ourselves a motel for no reason: we're happy to have regular guests visiting again." Once again he's impressed by their work: "(the album) is very groovy, full of surprises and quirky choices" (from the 3voor12 website)
Frustrating: I just found out that Eternal Woman was "song of the day" 10 days ago on the website of Magic, a French music magazine. Which means that you could listen to the entire song... just on that day.
Watch Turnpike Lodge, a French amateur band, covering Theme From Turnpike during one of their concerts. They also have a better version of their cover on the audio player of their website.
[via deus-fr]
There's a very interesting interview with Tom on Austrian public radio FM4, in German. The ORF website also has an article titled "Die belgische Schule des Rock", about dEUS and Mintzkov. A summary of the interview, with my limited knowledge of German. Contributions welcome:
ORF also have a rather nice concert review from 2005.
[thx to lovedeus for the tip]
Update: a Dutch translation by Wouter Verschelde
Update 2: an Englisch translation by lovedeus
Humo had a small interview with Tom and Anton Corbijn during the recordings for Lux XL.
Good one: Tom has been saying Tudio Russel instead of Studio Brussel when he met people of Studio Brussel because they were always skipping the intro of Suds & Soda.
(Source: Humo)
Don't know if anyone has ever noticed this, but you can also order the Pocket Revolution-songbook through Popshop.be. Click here.
The Blackbox Revelation (Myspace) will be supporting dEUS during the upcoming springtour until May 11th.
(Source: dEUS.be)
De Morgen also has a dEUS-contest. You can win tickets for Amsterdam, London and Paris. Transport to the cities is not included. Click here to enter.
Short snippets of the complete album are available on the website of the Plato-recordstore. You have to ask for a login-code first though.
(thx to Wouter)
Update: Plato removed the login-thing
Received a scan of the radiopromo of Slow today. Catalogue number is VVR5050773P. Click the image for a bigger version.
dEUS will perform The Architect live in Lux XL on Canvas next thursday (April 3rd, 23.15 hour). The central guest in the show is photographer Anton Corbijn. A video of the dEUS-performance will probably be available after the show here.
1. When She Comes Down
7. Is a Robot
If you have additions to this list, just leave it in the comments or drop me a line.
A quick summary of the LiveXS-interview:
An interview with Tom about the new album on Dutch Musiczine LiveXS. Tom is talking about almost each song on the album, but I have no time at this moment to translate it all. I'll try to do it later today.
Studio Brussel is celebrating its 25th birthday this weeks. Next sunday they will broadcast a Top 90 of the 90's. Six dEUS-songs are on the longlist: Hotellounge, Instant street, Little Arithmetics, Roses, Suds and soda and Via.
Click here to vote.
There will be a dEUS-signing session in Fnac Antwerpen (Groenplaats) on friday April 18th at 17.00 hour. Fnac will run a contest that day in which you can win the entire backcatalogue.
There's a dEUS-contest on the website of De Standaard. The next five days you can win tickets for the shows in Brussel and Leuven and each day a trip to a dEUS-gig outside Belgium.
According to Neli on ISR Vantage Point will be released in Japan on May 21st.
BTW: Found a drawing of Tom on Neli's blog.
A friend of mine listened to The Architect for the first time yesterday and he asked me if it was a new song by A Brand. The Architect is indeed very A Brand-ish. Go and judge for yourself.
Nice action for people living in the Breda-area: if you pre-order Vantage Point at Velvet Music you get a transparent 7" of Slow and an album poster for free. You also participate in a contest to win a canvas with the cover-artwork signed by the band.
According to Velvet Music a 2-track version of The Architect will be released on April 1st. No further info on the 2nd track. And Vantage Point will be available in a digipack too.
I upload a videofile I had on my pc to Youtube to share it with you. It's a small interview from Loladamusica with Tom in Ronda in 1999. More info (in Dutch) here.
Brecht notified me that there were a couple of dEUS-pics available at the website of photographer Guy Kokken. Kokken works for Weekend Knack and Oor.
The Architect has reached the first position in Humo's Top 20 and climbed further to two in De Afrekening.
For some people You can't deny what you liked as a child is an alltime dEUS-favorite. I found a great amateur-video on Youtube with that song as the soundtrack.
The Architect will enter the official Belgian chart Ultratop at 3 next saturday. It's the first time a dEUS-single scores so high in a chart based on sales. Last week the song entered at 1 in the tip-chart, so it's no suprise it pop ups in the real chart this week.
Since 1995 dEUS have only made it to the Ultratop three times. They scored their highest position in 2001 with Nothing Really Ends (30). Little Arithmetics made it to number 40 and Instant Street to 48.
Balder from Norway sings Worst Case Scenarioooooooooooo!
[thanks to Via for this cute interlude]
Kevin is digitalising his dEUS-VHS-archive. Another clip from Roxy (1995) show Belgian author Herman Brusselmans explaining the sudden international success of dEUS. The clip also features a short interview with Peter Vermeersch, the producer of Worst Case Scenario.
Kevin uploaded an historic dEUS-moment to Youtube. Back in 1995 Tom & Stef Kamil joined X-Legged Sally on stage during Roxy, a music show on VT4, for a unique version of Via.
The Architect entered Humo's Top 20-list at #4. Click here for the complete list.
There's some kind of press-release about Vantage Point on the Scala-website. Here's what it says about the album:
It also contains some words by Tom:The album draws to a close on an emotional note, the beautiful piano refrain on ''Smokers Reflect” framing it’s lyric of love’s regret. This is followed by the epic sweep of ‘The Vanishing Of Maria Schneider’, a lilting meditation upon the transitory nature of beauty which features the aching harmonies of Elbow’s Guy Garvey on guest vocals. ‘Popular Culture’ closes the album out with raggedy choirs singing philosophical choruses over strings and a veritable Phil Spector Wall Of Sound. A suitably grand exeunt for an album that plays large. A record that will provide a soundtrack to both nocturnal adventures as much as the wide open skies of festival season.
Vantage Point is the band’s most exciting album to date, 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.”
V2's online shop is listing a Vantage Point vinyl-release too.
The Architect climbed from 17 to 5 in De Afrekening from Studio Brussel. Leave your votes for next week here.
Another track of Vantage Point has leaked out. A podcast from Les Inrocks features Oh Your God. Click here to download the entire podcast. Oh Your God starts at 0:51.
The podcast-host also announces a gig in the Zénith (Paris) at the end of november.
(thx to Denis)
Here's a picture of the demo-tape Tom sent to Humo when dEUS entered the Rock Rally in 1992. 
One of the early dEUS-demo's has popped up on eBay. Bidding for No More Soda For Clarence starts from 130 euros.
Tom is talking about his reading habits in Humo today. A pdf-version can be found here.
You can now also listen to Slow on the dEUS Myspace.
There's an interview with Tom and Stéphane in French rockmagazine Les Inrocks. Here's a short round-up:
You can now download the Slow-video in high resolution. Click here and leave your e-mailadress.
According to the French blog, dEUS were recently in Saint-Ouen, for a video shoot. A video for The Architect maybe?
The tourpage on dEUS.be says the gig in the Londen Scala on April 16th is sold out.
The Slow video is now also available on the official dEUS-Youtube Channel.
Next tuesday there will be a Best of 30 years Rock Rally-compilation with Humo. I was hoping it would contain outtakes from the various Rock Rally-finals of the last 30 years, but I seems it's just an ordinary compilation with studio tracks. The compilation also contains a dEUS-song: Nothing Really Ends.
Studio Brussel is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. One of the commercials features dEUS.
A special newsletter by dEUS.be had a link to download a high-quality-version of the Slow-video. The video is a splitscreen from the band playing the song and footage from Luc Tuymans playing chess in a parc and the five angry looking girls dancing.
Here's what the band says about it in the newsletter:
The track Slow features the great Karin Dreijer Andersson from The Knife, her icy voice perfectly fitting the song. In the video 5 amazing young dancer girls represent Karin's part, resulting in a split screen video where you see the band playing and the girls dancing in our brand new Vantage Point studio in Antwerp.The video will probably be available on the dEUS-Youtube Channel very soon.
The new dEUS.be has an easter egg. When you enter the site you see the studio. At the rightbottom corner there's a pair of shoes. When you click the shoe, you'll see a pic of 5 angry looking girls. It's probably those 5 girls who will be dancing in the Slow-video. The photo is by Charlie De Keersmaecker.
(thx to several people on ISR)
Although a Bad Timing-video was more or less announced, it never came out. Luckily there's a great amateur-video for Bad Timing on Youtube. In case you don't remember: there's also an amateur-video for Sun Ra.
Next sunday Canvas will broadcast Tom did with Nick Cave. There's a small article in Humo this week where Tom talks about the interview.
You can watch the interview next sunday at 20.55 hour. There's a trailer over here.
According to this website a 7"-version of Slow will be released on April 21st.
(thx to Bass Junkie on ISR)
The extended version of dEUS.be is online right now. Be sure to check the video-section for some footage of Tom in the studio working on one of the songs. That song was the opening track for the album at the time I heard it for the first time. It's called Oh Your God and according to the tracklist this song is no longer the first one on the album.
The site was designed by Piksel, who also did the site for Any Way The Wind Blows.
(source: Myspace)
The Architect is now available on the Belgian iTunes Music Store. The digital release contains no b-side (so far). Click here to buy The Architect.
If you're not living in Belgium you can switch from your local iTunes store to the Belgian IMTS by clicking the dropdown at the bottom of the store.
(thx to Igor)
The holy grail for dEUS-fans (a Jack & Johny-version of Zea) is now for sale on eBay. Other rare stuff available at this moment:
Studio Brussel had a small interview with Michaël Borremans about the Vantage Point-artwork. One interesting thing that wasn't mentioned before: the stain right before the P of Vantage Point is an unintended coffee stain.
The Architect entered De Afrekening, the listeners' chart from Studio Brussel on #17. Click here to cast your votes for next weeks. The song also entered Arriba!, a chart by the Humo-journalists at 5.
As you read yesterday, the cover art for dEUS' forthcoming album Vantage Point is a drawing by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans. Called "Two Circles", the drawing is part of a series entitled "The Good Ingredients". It's a lucky coincidence then that The Good Ingredients, a new book collecting his recent and less recent drawings, will be published in May by Ludion. The author is Michael Amy, and you can pre-order the book (which contains English and Dutch text) here.
Like his paintings, Borremans’ drawings look like solidified fragments of an indeterminate and elusive time. They introduce the viewer to a sombre universe, devoid of bright colours, in which characters do strange things or carry out bizarre rituals with a certain resignation. His detailed décors involve us in complex, surrealist scenarios that are set in an ambiguous world.
There's another band picture on the website of Melt Festival. It's probably from the same shoot as the photo I use in the header of the blog. The pics are by Steve Gullick. Gullick worked for a bunch of bands in the past like Depeche Mode, Mogwai, My Morning Jacket and Liars. An extensive list is available on his Myspace.
The lyrics for The Architect are in this week's Humo. Click here for a pdf-version.
Knack has also a contest running. If you mail a question for Tom Barman, you might win an autographed version of Vantage Point.
Tom was interviewed in Move Your Ass on Dutch radio 3FM last friday. He talks about the recording of the new album.
You can relisten the interview here.
(thx to Kevin)
If you're not on Myspace yet or you're not friends with dEUS yet, you might consider being added as the band’s friend right now since the band is announcing an exclusive gift very soon!
Chicago-based webzine Pitchfork reviews Slow, with (again) a strong emphasis on the contribution of The Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson. I think the guys there are all secretly in love with her.
"Slow" is the sort of moody, and, yeah, methodically-paced track you might've expected from latter-day Blur: buzzing "How Soon Is Now?" guitar oscillations to one side, brittle stabs on the other, with whirring drums, a mordant bassline, and singer Tom Barman's weary alienation between. Synths and acoustic guitar wash over a downbeat chorus: "We slept through a million years/ Lived through a million fears." Andersson's here in a supporting role, her Björk-via-Victoria-Bergsman flutter adding extra eeriness and frailty as much as harmony.
No dEUS-victory in Humo's Pop Poll this year. Tom was 9th in the category Best Belgian singer and dEUS made it to the 4th place in Best Belgian group.
According to a press release from Melt Festival dEUS' appearance on Melt Festival will be their one and only German festival performance this year.
I've made a summary of the tourdates so far. Each gig has a link to the venue-website and a link to buy tickets. You can also browse to it through the Tourdates-item in the navigation. In the future I will update that page with the latest info (new dates, support acts, setlists,...). A graphical overview of the Vantage Point-tour is available on the tourmap.
And by the way: don't forget to add the gigs you're going to to your Facebook or Last.FM-events and to make plans with other fans on I Suffer Rock.
In his Feb. 25 message, Tom announced that Vantage Point would contain a song called Smokers Reflect. But back in April 2005, he'd told us on deus.be that Pocket Revolution would contain a song by that very name!
The album is almost finished. Title to be confirmed.
It will feature 12 new songs, of which, at this stage, 9 are finished:
'Pocket Revolution', 'The Real Sugar', 'Firewinds', 'Sun Ra', '7 days, 7 weeks' and 'Smoker's Reflect' to name just a few of them.
Stubru will air a couple of snippets from Tom's interview with Nick Cave for Spraakmakers today. You can watch the entire interview next sunday on Canvas at 8.55 PM.
Arthur and I have set up a separate forum at I Suffer Rock dedicated to the upcoming concerts. There's 1 topic for each date where you can discuss everything concerning that gig or make plans for pre- or after-show meetings.
As you have probably noticed I've pimped the layout of this blog. If you notice any problems on a certain browser, feel free to send me an e-mail.
Ryan did an attempt to write down the Slow-lyrics. Here we go:
Slow would be the tempo of the restless soul
You seem what a restless life can bring
Wait, and then wait until he's waiting for
They didn't see your everything
Slow would be the rhythm of the honey butt
Quick speed in the shatter of his eyes
And flowers you suppose will spread the words
Or how the world will slowly pass you by
Slow and tiredness of your control
And the moment is nearly standing still
And wait and not a second more
And face like a forbidden thrill
Gently behind the beat
We shuffle on ancient streets
The reverb of time
Is our vantage point
We slept for a million years
Lived through a million fears
We are not nervous
We will not ask for more
If you control I'm gonna slow too
Slow like the kissing of a lazy cheek
Like the minute and the deadline of the rush
And words, words waiting for you to speak
Or getting lost in your eternal crush
Slow would be the tempo of the restless mind
And see what a restless life can bring
And wait and then he waits until he's waiting for
Until the waiting can see your everything
Gently behind the beat
We shuffle on ancient streets
The reverb of time
Is our vantage point
We slept for a million years
Lived through a million fears
We are not nervous
We will not ask for more
Pawns of the troubled times
And kings of our petty crimes
The minds will function
With a small delay
See what the past has planned
The future's a beggar's hand
The more we understand
The slower our days
If you control I'm gonna slow too
I'm planning to build a sort of dEUS-quiz in the near future. The plan is to launch a new quiz every two weeks (or every month). I will probably need some help finding enough questions. So if you have ideas for good questions or I you have some dEUS-trivia, just drop me a line. It would be nice if you would also add the answer (and three other possibilities).
dEUS.be reports that White Lies is confirmed as the support act at the Londen Scala on April 16th.
Mauro has written a song (in Dutch) for the comeback-album of Flemish singer Isabelle A. Other people who contributed include Luc De Vos, An Pierlé, Sarah Bettens and Sioen. The album will be released somewhere in May and will be titled De Macht Der Gewoonte.
