Weathermen

Someone once said that everything old is new again and that seems to be the case with the Weathermen. Having enjoyed a certain amount of success in the ’80s and early ’90s, the Belgian duo, consisting of Jean-Marc Lederman and ex-Tuxedomoon keyboardist Bruce Geduldig, have just returned back on the scene with their fifth album, Deeper. Luckily, in the time they’ve been away, their style of music has become fashionable again despite the fact that they haven’t really changed their sound significantly doesn’t really matter. Suddenly the Weathermen have become a lot more relevant and could very well find themselves enjoying more than a nostalgic cult following. Never quite as dark as fellow countrymen Front 242, the Weathermen have always relied on their sense of humour to compensate for a slight lack of musical imagination. That is still the case, and "Daytime TV” with its George W. Bush samples and "House of Blues,” which tells the story of Phil Spector’s unfortunate gunplay incident are a couple of successful examples of this. The problem is that some attempts at humour just don’t work, such as a deadpan version of Burt Bacharach’s "Close To You,” and that makes for some uneasy listening. Deeper is more than just another band trying to hang on to former glories, but there are many better proponents of EBM around these days and this might be the last we see of the Weathermen for another decade.