Review Summary: Solid atmospheric prog rock/metal
Let's see. What are the French famous for? Cheese? Wine? Paris? The Eiffel Tower? Jeu de boules? Progressive rock? Whoa, did I just mention that and France in the same sentence? I didn't know they made music like that in France. Well, anyway, silly intro aside, Demians is a one-man-band gone more-members-live from France, and they play the kind of music you expect out of Britain, Sweden or the United States, not France. What's that they play then?
In a nutshell, these guys sound like what you would get if you took Porcupine Tree, put a French accent on the vocals, removed a bit of Wilson's boy's choir timbre, and added some more rich ambient synthesizer arrangements. This has every prerequisite of a modern prog rock album: the heavy Opeth/Riverside-esque rhythm guitar crunch, mellow vocals, moody acoustic guitar playing, LOTS AND LOTS of atmospheric synths, and long complex songs. The closing track "Sand" (not counting the bonus track "Earth") is sixteen minutes long, and opener "The Perfect Symmetry" clocks in over nine. In short, this is the kind mature album you'd expect from some veteran prog outfit. But here's the catch: this is a debut album. It's far too crystalline and well-produced for a first record, and hence PT mainman Steven Wilson's accolades and praise (which featured on oh, just about every promo ad concerning this band) are unsurprising.
Fortunately, Wilson wasn't off the mark. The album may be a bit overlong, but it's a grower album, and the songwriting is varied and spicy enough to keep things interesting throughout Building an Empire's one-hour-plus duration. Things move along from swirling ambient pieces to crunchy riffs and moody acoustic guitar-led passages. The performance is tight throughout the whole album as well, which is to be expected considering this record was recorded by Nicolas Chapel himself (the live band features session musicians). In short, there's no obvious flaws on the record; it's all nicely executed, well put-together, especially for the amount of experience Mr Chapel has.
However the issue with this record is, it can tend to get a bit... long. This is one of those albums that would have been better off with a runtime of about 45 instead of 65 minutes, because although there is a wealth of good material, it just is interspersed with some more boring ambient bits that tend to go nowhere. When the band combines the guitar crunch with the moody atmospheres, everything works perfectly fine, but the purely mellow bits don't seem to add anything except padding the song lengths. Occasionally Mr Chapel also produces some pretty unmemorable verses that seem to make some parts of this album (namely the overlong "Sand") drag on for too long. Chapel's enthusiasm also shows more on record than live (his nervosity and static stage presence kind of dull my enthusiasm for the band as a live piece) due to his passionate delivery, which kind of helps to nullify the bloated timespan of the record, however.
Overall, this album could probably get higher scores everywhere on the merit of this being produced by a first-timer. But taken by its cumulative merits, Chapel seems to need a bit more time to evolve and produce his final sound into something slightly less derivative (of Porcupine Tree's formula mainly) and more into a direction of his own. However, there's no denying the skill involved in making this record, and this surely is a band to hear more from in the future. Perhaps with some live experience under their collective belts and the benefit of working with other musicians in the studio, Chapel can pull off a hammer next time. He definitely seems capable of it.
