The German progressive pop act DE/VISION has grown up – this became apparent beyond all doubt with the arrival of their 1998 recording ‘Monosex’, released to celebrate their tenth band anniversary. While Steffen, Markus, and Thomas successfully made the transition from pure synth pop to a sophisticated electro sound with techno, trance, drum’n’bass and crossover influences, their 1999 album ‘Void’ swept aside the band’s own conventions, confronting their faithful fans with unusually harsh guitar-based sounds, and their single releases ‘Foreigner’ and ‘Freedom’ proved their distinct ability to turn out wonderfully catchy material.

The new millennium brought along quite a few changes for the band. Since their cooperation with WEA did not help them to realize their musical vision the way they had always dreamt they would, DE/VISION moved on to Drakker Entertainment’s electro label e-wave and shrunk to a duo after the split with Markus – hence the title of the current album. ‘Two’ is songwriter and vocalist Steffen and lyricist Thomas’ relative return to their own origins, namely electronically arranged tracks with a strong catchiness factor.

“I wanted to work with more song-oriented material again, with material that goes straight into the ear,” explains Steffen. “On ‘Void’, we destroyed the song structures in order to create something new out of them. The basic idea with ‘Two’ was to expand the structures of the preproduction versions, not to take the tracks apart but to continue working on the demo version.” As a result, DE/VISION in collaboration with producer Georg Kaleve, with whom the band have been working since their single success ‘Strange Affection’, have come up with an album that still impresses with the use of guitars on tracks like ‘Heart-Shaped Tumor’, ‘State Of Mind’ or ‘Uncaring Machine’, while generally returning to electronically instrumented pop tracks with a haunting chorus and tenderly flowing grooves. Although the album operates mainly in the fairly slow to mid-tempo regions, there’s never a minute’s boredom.

On ‘Two’; DE/VISION have not only succeeded in giving their songs enough unusual highlights to keep the tension going right up to the closing track ‘Lonely Day’, but also in continuously building it up, letting it culminate in the impressive anthem ‘Uncaring Machine’. Be it the spoken French intro on ‘State Of Mind’, the noise-oriented ‘Silent Moan’ or the wonderfully pompous pop number ‘Escape the World’ – DE/VISION always move nonchalantly among electronic forms of expression, never losing sight of their extremely captivating melodies and sensitive lyrics.

Their pure enjoyment is unmistakable in every second of the songs, most of them at least five minutes long, which Steffen and Thomas recorded with the assistance of producer Georg Kaleve and additional arranger Josef Bach. ‘Two’ is an album that can be listened to in one go – more so than any other DE/VISION album to date – and keeps surprising the listener with new ideas that make the passage of the material into the auditory canal a really eventful journey.

...-> best is, when you listen to it, and build your own opinion about it.