| CD REVIEW Demians |
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Band : Demians Now a band with touring schedules, Demians was originally the one-man effort of Frenchman Nicolas Chapel. As a youngster, he had fun rummaging through his older brother's vinyl collection, listening to anything from the Beatles to Metallica, and he claims his influences in making music are quite diverse, ranging from Tori Amos and Radiohead to Ambient music. When he got around to creating the music for his debut album Buiding An Empire, he'd already decided he'd call the project Demians, after the Hermann Hess novel Demian, stating the songs would be his little “demians”, which would help him understand the world. To his surprise, his album (recorded in his own bedroom) got real good response in his own country, and when it got picked up by InsideOut for international distribution (starting May 2008), the result was a globally spread positive reaction. In response to people's open-mindedness towards his music, Nicolas decided to form a band (recruiting bassist Antoine Pohu and drummer Michaël Roponus, whom would soon be replaced by Gaël Haller) to take the music on the road, including support slots on tours with the likes of Porcupine Tree, Marillion, and Anathema for several tours through Europe. Winter 2009 having come to pass, Chapel felt the need to create new songs, and immediately set to create new opuses, planning to record 'em during the Summer, and having a new album out in early 2010. Well, somehow things got dragged out, apparently, but here the album finally is after all! Just like the first album, Chapel recorded the album all by himself, seeing the music as an expression of himself, seeing his lyrics as a way to deal with his problems. It's not therapy, so he claims, but they dó help him to find a needed balance, a way to live with his wounds (sounds like therapy to me after all...what you?). The music on the album was conceived slightly different this time as well, played through actual instruments rather than with the multiple sampling he used on the debut. The effort, so Chapel claims, was to find his own sound, and so he played all instruments (there's guitar, bass, and drums of course...but also cello, double bass, violin, piano, and mellotron. In his own words, Mute contains 9 songs that range from raw Alternative to orchestral parts and poetic sounds, but the focus is always on the songs, reflecting both Chapel's strengths as well as his weaknesses. And, in an effort to stay as true to himself as possible, he tracked all instruments in a maximum of two takes, keeping the rawness and sometimes even the mistakes...just to confront the person that he really is! Well, hard for me to make comparisons to the debut album (which is said to be more polished), because I haven't come across it (yet, and that's a situation I intend to see changed soon enough, I tell ya). I could've put time in listening to the couple of tracks off the debut posted (alongside a full-length and a sample off the new album) at myspace.com/demiansmusic, but quite frankly, I hardly have enough time to listen to the album while already making the preliminaries to this review, as there's so màny darn albums still needing to be reviewed (as you can tell from the caption, this album was released late June, and that's the catching up I have to get through – could anyone invent the 48-hour day please?). Still, Mute immediately struck a chord, and I'm definitely not only going to buy my own copy of the album (right now, I'm working with a download promo copy), and the debut, but setting 'em both aside on my cupboard for later catching up in a silent moment! 98/100 Tony. |