The Understate Men Biography – 15-8-2014
The Understate Men are the two Dutch singer-songwriters Diftong and JD Dekker. They play
Rhine Delta Americana music on their guitars, mandolin and banjo. Their latest CD A Major
Happening is an album with poetic songs about loss, loneliness and love.
A Major Happening is a “five-year-long-Tuesday-evening-effort’. Five years in which the duo
shaped their music. The album title was chosen because both the opening track and the title
track tell the story of two strong women, one a major in the Dutch Salvation Army, the other
a major in the US Air Force. Other songs on the album are about a guitar that was bought in
1943 in Germany, a hard rain that has turned into a torrential downpour, an army in a
sandpit, on-line loneliness and dealing with the losses that come with age. Melancholy with
a touch of light-heartedness here and there.
The album is mostly played on acoustic instruments, among them an old Gibson mandolin, a
1932 Martin, that guitar bought in 1943 and a crappy five-string banjo with four strings. For
rhythm, they used a double bass, a brass band bass drum and the cheapest snare on the
internet. Sometimes they hit whatever was laying around the house. A piece of paper or a
roof beam. It gave them the shaky and ragged sound that they were looking for and that is
so characteristic for The Understate Men’s Rhine Delta Americana.
JD Dekker and Diftong both started out as bass players. While playing in seventies rock,
eighties new wave and nineties grunge bands, too much was hip and happening and too
little was heartfelt. The Understate Men got together with a natural inclination towards
American country music. They started writing their own songs and have been playing and
recording them since the late nineties of the last century. They call their songs Rhine Delta
Americana. Rhine Delta Americana is based on music from across the ocean, from that other
great river delta in Louisiana, where all the musical influences on the North American
continent flow out to sea. Tuning in with their transistor radios, The Understate Men caught
the sound of their heroes Neil Young and Creedence Clearwater Revival and many others
who made them want to play that very music in their own river delta.
By 2009 The Understate Men had recorded two full self-released CD’s and an EP. In
2008/2009 they toured The Netherlands to promote their EP Renegade King and then set
about to record the next album. They got sidetracked several times. Diftong pursued a solo
career and JD Dekker played bass in a 15-piece soul band, a funky blues group with his
brother and a Jimi Hendrix tribute. But all the while, they kept writing and rearranging songs,
recording and re-recording tracks in a place called The Odditorium, their free standing
twelve by fifteen feet rehearsal room and studio. It has wall-to-wall carpeting, a gas stove,
loads of equipment and a recording booth with heavy curtains. The sound of closing and
opening those curtains has to be silenced on every recorded track, or all songs would start
and end with a curtain drawing symphony. Of all the hours spent in The Odditorium, not all
are used creatively. Many are spent drinking tea and shooting the breeze, talking about
music.