Portrait at Astan Musikmagazin
Oliver Dean »Ghetto Love«

Dandy with elegance and coolness

Automatic translation: www.deepl.com/translate

Rarely, very rarely do I get timeless gems as food for my CD player. This is such a case. No gimmicks, no over-excited pathos - nothing there. The coolness with which this man is able to lick the wounds of his aching psyche, this coolness may call only few her own. Oliver Dean gets to do it.

I always wished you could see it all
I always wished you could feel it all
I always wished you could stop to suffer

This man has more style, elegance and melancholy in his little finger than many a death poet cannot press on 1 million records. And he needs no false pathos, no artificial masquerade. This is the English CD that Sven Regener always wanted to make. Oliver Dean has combined the style of Bryan Ferry, David Bowie and Peter Murphy. He has the musical lyrical power of a Sven Regener, a Lou Reed or a Nick Cave. And he’s real.

The same likes to join the same. So Dean can fall back on musicians who know how to cast sublime dandyism and classically stylish elegance into notes. Above everything but Dean’s incredible voice. No Caruso, God knows not. But Dean has what so many singers are missing - he has something special. When he sings: No more Words - and no more meaning. Inside Outside. My thoughts are bleeding. Then so it is. That’s what you feel. That touch of boredom that Dean makes a stylistic device. This radiates enormous intensity and yes - also melancholy. But Oliver Dean doesn’t scream and moan, doesn’t die in the middle of his performance.

Why can the words you say
Never be the words I need?
Why can the Thougths you wear
never be the thoughts I need?

A language that leaves no questions unanswered, coupled with impressively reserved music. Simple, clear but oppressive at the same time. Dean whispers his nightmares and self-doubt into the mic. But he doesn’t go down in public. His soul burns, but the fire that seems to eat him does not touch the dandy in him. And yet it is not possible to hide the embers of his feelings. He does not scream, he prolongs single words and thus puts any mispresented smear theatre far in the shade. When he seems to whistle thoughtlessly into the wind, accompanied by piano and guitar, then that has simply class.

A CD with style, elegance and musical class. A record for melancholics. Music for people who feel painful like the blues but know how to live it with the aristocratic coolness of an English dandy.

Astan Music Magazine 5/98

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