Mikhail Gorbachev. Not the way most would expect a review of Darwin Deez’s Songs For Imaginative People to start
but the former Soviet statesman is to play a surprisingly large part in this
piece. To start, he is given a mention in just the second song of the album, You Can’t Be My Girl. It is not so much
his inclusion in the lyric that is important (Deez merely uses a female’s
fascination with the ex-General Secretary for another reason as to why she
cannot ‘be his girl’), rather it is what his inclusion represents – the utterly haphazard, though wholly intended, nature
of this LP.
In Alice, for example, Deez
jumps between pre-chorus and chorus as much as he changes note on guitar (a lot),
whilst on No Love it is the vocals
that aren’t too sure whether they are coming or going. Similarly to Gorbachev’s
dissolution of the Soviet Union, the whole affair is bittersweet – just as
those in charge before Gorbachev’s time found that though the old Chairman of
the Supreme Soviet’s plans were at first difficult to listen to, they and the
country as a whole would soon go onto (quite literally) greener pastures, so too
will the listener initially struggle to muster Deez’s seemingly disorderly
approach, only to come to realise it is exactly this that gives it it’s
character. For example, just as it is easy to imagine the heartache felt by the
aforementioned law graduate of Moscow State University when he lost his childhood sweetheart to leukemia in 1999, so too can one feel the hurt of the multi-instrumental
New Yorker when he describes on Chelsea’s
Hotel how he never got the chance to lose the love of his crush as he never
attained it in the first place.
4/5
Released by Lucky Number Music on 11th February 2013
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