Big Face 2011

"The difficult trade-off between diversity and cohesion. The D Project is the brainchild of Stephane Desbiens, Canadian singer, guitarist and keyboard player. The music on Big Face can perhaps be described as dark symphonic prog rock (King Crimson, Pink Floyd) entwined with some 'deviant' prog metal elements - in the spirit of Devon Graves' Deadsoul Tribe where the rhythm distorted guitars are kept low in the mix and the bass and voice take a leading role. The highlights of the album are definitely its gloomy atmospheres (check out the first couple of minutes of the opener They to see what I mean) and Desbiens' amazing guitar solos - it doesn't get much better than when excellent technical skills are combined with expressive guitar playing. On the negative side, I feel that the album somehow lacks cohesion - the listener is taken through a mixture of styles (pop/punk, AOR, some mainstream rock as well as more proggy parts) that don't always stick well together. It is almost as Desbiens decided to throw in the mix as many influences as he could to make the songs interesting and original. This approach can be as unsuccessful as it can be rewarding. Unfortunately, in this case it just does not work. The impression that Big Face is a rather disjointed album is further aggravated by the fact that the quality of the music is not steady across its 9 songs. For sure, the album contains some excellent songs: They is a brilliant opener, half way between Pink Floyd and King Crimson, with a great bass groove provided by Tony Levin and amazing sax parts courtesy of Giovany Artega; the title track Big Face is a fine dark rock song where Quidam's singer Bartek Kossowicz delivers an excellent performance as lead voice; Conspiracy is an adventurous instrumental that grabs the listener attention and doesn't let go. However, on Big Face there is also plenty of rather uninteresting fillers (e.g. the ordinary punk/rock aggression of So Low and Anger III, or the boring AOR ballad Kids Will Never Know). Overall, this leaves me with mixed feelings about this album. At the end of the closing song, Poussiére De Lumière, I often find myself tempted to give the album another spin so that I can immerse myself again in the beautiful sombre atmospheres that some of the songs manage to create. However, I then remember the boring bits - and at the thought of having to go through these, I often give up and reach for some other musical adventure. Between 2 and 3 stars, really."