Building a following
How do you describe a man like Nicolas Chapel, the brains behind the one man recording artist known as Demians. I cant, but I’m also glad he decided to ply his wares and bring a touring version over to dear ‘ol Blighty, with thanks to two of his chums, minus the keyboard player! Strange, as layered textured keyboards are a staple of his music, and would have been better actually touring with his keyboardist
Demians is very hard to define. If your idea of songwriting is intro / verse / bridge / chorus / verse / chorus / solo / bridge /chorus, then you are way out of your depth, probably in the Channel, or that Abyss type place in the film ‘The Abyss!’. Demians is more of a thought provoking experience, with almost every song carefully measured, and in most cases, building up to a classic grinding riff based crescendo. A thinking man’s Tool, and that’s saying something. Why limit yourself to a four min song when you can do it in nine, and still wow the audience.
I just had to see the bloke playing support to Anathema, as ‘Building an Empire’ is still one, if not my fave album of 2008. Thankfully early rumours of his placid stage manner are now in the past. He even smiles!
It was a relief that the audience arrived just before Demians, with 20 mins to kick off I sware there was eight of us in the building. Quite right, Demians slayed us. We were treated to a small snapshot of the debut album with great renditions of Naive (a bit of a Creed feeling to it), a new? gong, Feel Alive with plenty of textured synth sounds, and all in all this was a very composed and professional performance, but all over way too quick for my liking
The songs seemed edited from the cd version, but in saying that, when three of your albums songs total thirty-three mins, it’s a bit difficult to sell your trackss during a thirty min support slot. I just hope he comes back soon and plays his own gig, as I did not see a single non-believer in the venue. Merci.