Worst Case Scenario

DEUS: “Worst Case Scenario” (Island)

DAVE COUSE, God bless his little aching heart, is hardly ever wrong. “It’s been a long time since the seventies/ Nowadays everyone is taking themselves too seriously,” he says, and guess what? Mercury Rev crumpled under the weight of too many egos. The Sugarcubes, having eaten all their menus, dissolved. Pavement have started writing coherent lyrics, for God’s sake. There’s a crisis in pop music: no-one sings about bullshit anymore.

dEUS’s Worst Case Scenario is a valiant attempt to fill this void and while it’s not Yerself Is Steam, it’ll do for now. Whether it’s down to their poor grasp of English (though they’re Belgian, so they’re probably more fluent than most people from, say, Yorkshire) or to the gallons of acid you must consume to make life in a shithouse like Antwerp bearable, they have constructed a veritable seminar in psychedelia.

Whether it’s the opener ‘Suds And Soda’, posing the question “Suds and Soda mix OK with beer/can I/can I break your sentiment?” or the marvellous, jazzy ‘Great American Nude’ noting “Burton in a salad bar sweet like a candy bar/No more bourbon for a clean genius in quarantine,” it makes for mystifying and genuinely intriguing listening, and the interest is equally held by what sounds like three electric guitars all being ravished by a profoundly deaf Joey Santiago.

Also, I do them a disservice by hinting that they’re completely pointless: they have the rare knack of making a completely random aggregation of words, sung soft, sound like the most meaningful thing you’ve ever heard - listen to ‘Secret Hell’ or the dumbfounding ‘Right As Rain’, use your imagination a little, and weep. Quite insane and often insanely great, ...Case... won’t be dismissed.

• Niall Crumlish