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French progressive rock is regularly
associated with Agne. But with Lac Placide, we get a group of
musicians who don’t want to identify themselves with the past. The
result is a mix of progressive rock, combined with prog metal, pop
and jazz and ambiance music. The harmonious singing between the male
and female singer is what distinguishes this band; the one sings in
French while the other sings in English. It’s remarkable, it works
and it’s original.
The album begins with some small surprises. First there’s a bit of
ambiance with bubbling water (a theme that continues in between
tracks) and then comes a heavy guitar riff that’s reminiscent of U2.
It seems that this Paris band strives for diversity in their music,
just like the personal diverseness of the musicians themselves. Here
is music of the 80s being combined with prog rock and prog metal and
a bit of Celtic influences heard here and there. Although the
simultaneous singing in the two languages is quite original, I think
it’s used too much. In “Fairies and Tales”, there are hard, metal
type passages combined with organ solos. It’s quite amazing and fun
and it could have been a song from The Doors.
“Growing Circle” is a beautiful, slow, dark song with threatening
tendencies, whereby the tempo is lifted with metal influences mixed
with the Door’s style organ. However, I would have left out that
second vocalist.
“Too Real” sounds like Dream Theater. Vocally, it’s less impressive,
but musically, it’s got lots of nice guitar and keyboard solos.
“Heaven Knows” begins with a Pink Floyd sounding intro and continues
with a Mostly Autumn influence, especially with that harmonized
singing. The atmosphere becomes a bit more aggressive and evolves
into a mix of prog metal, gothic and jazz. This is the style in
which the band really shines. It’s an excellent piece of progressive
music.
The last song has an acoustic guitar intro (reminds me of the guitar
sounds of Al Stewart)…oh, yes, I forgot about that water in the
beginning ;-). Afterwards, there are some percussion and atmospheric
pieces (that get somewhat redundant, I think), followed by a lot of
nothing and then the guitars explode into prog metal passages. It
would’ve been better to have ended the CD with the previous song.
We’ll just call that an innocent error in judgement.
The production of the album isn’t completely spotless, but that has
to do with the fact that this was a self produced CD. Yet, I’m
pleasantly surprised by this young French band (who started in 1997)
who have slowly but surely made a name for themselves in the prog
world. The CD cover cries out ‘ambiance music’, but ‘Away’ offers
very much more indeed. It’s a nice debut album that leaves you
wanting more.
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