★★★★★
Two years ago, the Johnny Jewel-led band Symmetry released Themes for an imaginary film. Speculation was that Jewel had originally been asked to make the score for Nicolas Refn's masterful Drive, and it was easy to hear why. Themes had an '80s-styled sound filled with pulsating synth lines and Eurythmics-esque drum machines, but beyond that Themes nearly fit the label of concept album. Night drives and neon lights all came to mind while listening, even if story was only hinted at...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-01-20
★★★★★
Get this for a publicist's wet dream: a young and talented composer, after graduating the prestigious Yale University, retreats to the Canadian Rockies to escape the noise of urban life. There, in solitude, he composes in its entirety a sprawling chamber-pop concept album, naming it after the Spanish town that hosts the running of the bulls; only, the composer isn't a singer, so he recruits three friends to sing the different 'characters' on the album...
- www.beat.com.au
2013-11-21
★★★★★
San Fermin is the brainbaby of Brooklyn composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, who wrote this ambitious debut record while holed up for six weeks in a studio in a Canadian mountain range. A mixture of classical composition and bombastic pop, Ludwig-Leone's suite of songs is connected with common themes and characters that manifest and recur across San Fermin's 17 tracks. It's not quite a concept record, but a record stuffed with concepts. And at its high points, it's brilliant...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2013-11-21
★★★★★
After graduating with a degree in music from Yale, Ellis Ludwig-Leone stole away to the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies to write his self-titled debut LP under the moniker San Fermin. For six weeks at this artist space on the border between Alberta and British Columbia, the composer filled pages with arrangements, took afternoon walks up the mountain, and came down to blacken the pages some more...
- pitchfork.com
2013-09-30
Loading...
