Coming just eight months after 2011’s acclaimed Keep You Close, this stealth release by Antwerp art-rockers dEUS comes as a bit of surprise. Tom Barman & Co. aren’t exactly renowned for their productivity, having taken an average of three or more years between each of their previous six albums, so it’s probably safe to say that much of Following Sea came out of the Keep You Close sessions.
Despite the various nautical references scattered throughout its 11 tracks, it’s not quite as coherent a collection as its predecessor. There’s not a whole lot of depth to frothy feel-good songs like the lamely titled ‘Crazy About You’ or ‘Girls Keep Drinking’. On the plus side, it’s certainly current – ‘The Give Up Gene’ is about the sinking of the Costa Concordia.
Moody album opener and first cut, ‘Quatre Mains’, is sung in French (a first for the Belgians), but the rest of the album is in English. This exposes the weakness of some of the lyrics. Barman has an amazingly cool voice, but lines like, “Fame has put something in our drink/ And this feeling’s a raft that just wouldn’t sink”, simply don’t float.
There are some extremely fine moments. The intertwining guitars of ‘Nothings’ recall their Ideal Crash heyday. ‘Hidden Wounds’ is mostly spoken-word, Barman reading aloud a Guardian article about post-traumatic stress disorder, but is still compelling. The stomping ‘Fire Up The Google Beast’ is a Pixies influenced stream-of-consciousness rant. Album closer ‘One Thing About Waves’ is as gloriously epic as anything they’ve done.
Despite these standouts, Following Sea is essentially dEUS-lite. But it’ll still probably be the best thing to come out of Belgium this year.