San Fermin – The Cormorant: I would sing for my life, if I knew the words.

Artist: San Fermin
Album: The Cormorant I & II
Year: 2020
Grade: A-

In Brief: Is it a rock band? A chamber pop ensemble? A composer using whatever instrumentalists and vocalists he has on hand to execute his creative vision? Whatever you want to call San Fermin, they’re quite generous with the orchestral adornments, the natural and mythical imagery, and the diversity of vocal perspectives throughout the 16 tracks on this 2-part record. While much of The Cormorant is a down-tempo exercise in pastoral beauty, there are several moments that will genuinely surprise you.

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It’s funny when you’re listening to a band for the first time, and you think you hear certain influences or vocal similarities to other artists you’re familiar with, only to find out that some of those other artists actually came from the band you’re listening to. That was one of my first impressions of San Fermin, a Brooklyn-based ensemble with composer/songwriter Ellis Ludwig-Leone at its nucleus. Despite being the band’s primary creative force, he doesn’t appear to sing on any of the songs he writes, but instead outsources that duty to fellow founding member and guitarist Allen Tate, as well as a revolving door cast of female vocalists. Members of the band over the years have included Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, now better known as the co-lead singers of Lucius, and also Rae Cassidy, who I can recall hearing on a few Copeland tracks. I guess Ellis has a type in terms of the vocalists he prefers to recruit, because I get a similar vibe from current members Karlie Bruce and Claire Wellin (the latter of whom also plays violin), to the point where I could swear I’m hearing long lost Lucius tracks in a few places. Elsewhere I’m reminded of acts as diverse as Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver and Sylvan Esso, who I’m assuming had no direct involvement at any point in the band’s past, but who may have served as touchstones for their malleable sound. Many people in this group, including Ellis himself, wear multiple hats and contribute multiple instruments, giving the record a very collaborative feel even if there’s primarily one guy masterminding it all. And I really appreciate that sort of thing in a mostly mellow, long-winded record like their fourth album, The Cormorant, which was released in two halves, with part one coming out in the fall of 2019 and then part two following in the spring of 2020.

Upon first glance, The Cormorant might seem to be a bit of an all-over-the-place record. Of the sixteen tracks scattered across its two halves, you can find everything from lushly produced indie rock anthems, to delicate acoustic ballads, to short, abstract instrumental asides. A few cuts are surprisingly poppy, given the band’s classical inclinations – you wouldn’t necessarily hear one of those in isolation and expect the sort of ornate arrangements that you might hear in the tracks surrounding it. While I have yet to determine if there’s a central story bringing all of these disparate pieces of music into focus, the album does manage to flow pretty well despite all of the different stylistic hats the group tries on for size, and the black shorebird it’s named after is an image that a few of the songs return to over the course of the album, both reveling in and expressing skepticism toward the folklore and iconography that humans have constructed around it. A few of the songs seem to conjure up images of childhood, of a gradual loss of innocence and desire to return to the sort of wonder and grandeur one could easily experience at that age, and even when sung in Tate’s more reserved voice, they feel deeply personal, which is to both his and Ellis’s credit since a person who did not write them is being entrusted with their delivery. I can often get overwhelmed by a double album with this much to offer, but none of these tracks really overstay their welcome, with the whole thing lasting roughly fifty minutes if listened to in one go. For that reason, I’ve come back to it quite a bit more than I expected to during that somewhat intimidating first listen. It’s shaping up to be one of my favorite releases of 2020 (even if I know half of it technically came out in 2019).

If there’s a drawback to The Cormorant, it’s that the early singles from the project’s first half seem to be drawing attention to the wrong things, and I don’t think they’re representative of the album or the band’s sound as a whole. I could be wrong about this, considering that I have yet to go back to any of San Fermin’s older stuff. But the more electric guitar-driven, indie rock vibe of the anthems “The Hunger” and “Saints”, the songs you’re most likely to have stumbled across from this project if you’ve heard anything from it at all, are actually two of the tracks I’d consider the least interesting. Nothing wrong with ’em – they’re serviceable and even a bit catchy. Just not as distinguishable from other acts in the genre as some of the more baroque pop or folk-oriented stuff is. The up-tempo material seems to be parceled out even more sparingly on the second disc, but I feel that the few tracks there that go for more of a rhythmic or pop approach do a better job of standing out. Still, I appreciate the variance that San Fermin brings to the table, rather than churning out 16 tracks of lovely but mostly indistinguishable compositions in the exact same vein. I love that I can pick two or three favorite tracks from this record, and an innocent bystander could hear them all in a row and have no idea they were from the same band. The ability to do that while creating an album that feels cohesive and engaging from front to back is the sign of a truly talented ensemble.

INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:

DISC ONE

1. The Cormorant
The title track gives us quite a bit to chew on in just two and a half minutes, opening and closing with bird calls (which I assume come from the black bird the album and song are named after), which serve as bookends for a deceptively cheery song driven by a brisk piano melody. When the two women’s voices come in, setting a scene of waking up in the morning, seeing the golden rays of sun streaming in through the window, and hearing children on a nearby playground, it’s almost like the opening scene from a Disney movie, in which you can picture the heroine starting her day and saying hello to all the townsfolk. But this comes rather jarring when it’s juxtaposed with the dream this person was supposedly woken up from, in which a cormorant visited them, foretold of their death, and asked them who they wanted to say goodbye to and what to do with their body. As the song continues to spring to life with plucked strings, horns, and snappy little percussion riffs, it feels a lot like Illinois-era Sufjan Stevens, which I love. But there’s something unique about the way it superimposes the specter of death upon an otherwise idyllic, innocent scene.
Grade: A-

2. Cerulean Gardens
We first hear the voice of Allen Tate on a understated, acoustic guitar-driven track that turns out to be one of the album’s cornerstone songs. As mild-mannered and even-keeled as his delivery is, I get the feeling that there are a lot of insecurities and half-remembered childhood incidents buried underneath, and that’s communicated especially well by the generous amount of minor chords that get thrown into the arrangement. Throughout this song, the horns hum softly like insects hovering over a field of flowers, the drums click-clack away without ever coming to the forefront, and the piano emphasizes certain chords for drama, with the band even pulling off a striking key change at one point. But the focus never shifts away from the continuous guitar arpeggio and Allen’s voice, as he plays the role of a young child begging his father to let him in on the secret of where he goes at night. The idea that there’s a secret garden that he can only tend to at night to sounds a lot like a child constructing a story to disguise a harsher reality that he’s either too young to process or just doesn’t want to face – then again, I don’t know of many children who are familiar with the color “cerulean”, which is like a deep sky blue (unless they were like me and they obsessed over every single color in their box of 64 Crayolas, I guess). That small detail, telling us what color the gardens are, seems to add so much to the song in terms of its hue and the notion that it’s probably a mythical location that the child finds far more interesting than whatever the ugly truth is. Having grown up with parents who didn’t get along that well, and with my dad often puttering about in the garage into the wee hours of the night to avoid being in the house while the rest of us were still awake, I find this song to be deeply relatable.
Grade: A+

3. Hickman Creek
This minute-long instrumental brings the classical instrumentation to the forefront, beginning with the plucking of a harp and softly building up the horns, woodwinds, and wordless female vocals until it abruptly ends. It’s a pretty start, but it feels incomplete and doesn’t work that well as an intro to the next track. I wish this one could have been further developed.
Grade: C+

4. The Hunger
Where I don’t find that San Fermin’s sound works as well for me is when they try to bring in more conventional rock instrumentation. It just feels more middle-of-the-road to me, and while the classical elements are still present, it feels like they’re fighting the rock elements for space. The electric guitar and drums are the lead instruments here, along with the female vocals singing a rather monotone verse, in the album’s lead single. It’s a song that certainly has some meaningful things to say, in terms of the lengths a woman goes to in order to basically present herself as a pleasant blank slate on a first date, as if she knows that revealing too much of her true self, or daring to have an actual appetite at the meal they share together, is not terribly likely to lead to a second date. The song ties into the larger theme of the album when she contrasts the tedious effort of keeping up this facade with her more carefree childhood days, when she didn’t have to pretend to be herself in order to gain social acceptance, and didn’t have to worry about going through such rituals in order to find companionship and eventually start a family of her own. I like what this one’s doing literally – it just feels jarring and out of context with the rest of the album, mostly because of the not-terribly-convincing “rock” direction it tries to take, and also a little bit because the line “why’d I wear these fucking shoes” sticks out like a sore thumb a very pristine-sounding record that is almost completely swear-free otherwise. It sounds like it belongs on a completely different album – so if this is the first thing you hear from San Fermin, just know that it’s a bit misleading.
Grade: C+

5. Summer By the Void
The bird calls are back again, hovering in the background of an even more delicate acoustic song sung by Allen, as he plays the role of a teenage boy, awestruck at the “hum and the noise” of his last summer before adulthood, but also seeming to tremble with the realization that once this summer is over, nothing will be the same. Perhaps he’s going off to college in the fall, or he’ll have to start a job somewhere to make a living. Or he’s staying put, but his friends and/or girlfriend are leaving to do these things, and a place that once was full of life for him is on the verge of feeling very empty. Once again I love the rich imagery that this one brings to the table, and the soft accents given to it by the occasional horn or woodwind instrument as the guitar softly picks its way through this young man’s feelings. What’s weird to me is how an already mellow song seems to slow down slightly as it approaches its ending. I might be imagining this, but it’s like the ensemble is sort of fighting against its own attempt to build momentum, and then the crescendo just sort of dies down before hitting its expected climax.
Grade: B

6. Saints
The album’s second single is one of those songs that uses religious imagery in its central metaphor in a way that is deliberately uncomfortable. The song’s really not about religion at all, but rather a relationship that is dragging out when one person would really prefer to just end it already. But the way she poses the question to him, “Why you have to be a goddamn saint?”, makes me wince a little if I’m being honest. I totally get the intent of it – he’s being so darn nice, basically an all-around boy scout, just to keep her around, possibly because the person she’s talking to is the very same seventeen-year-old from the previous song who is terrified of his idyllic teenage life changing and trying to cling to the biggest constant he thought he had going for him, unwilling to acknowledge that his girlfriend already has one foot out the door. The electric guitar, while I still find the tone of it a bit dry, at least serves more of a purpose here, due to the occasional angry bursts it injects into the otherwise quieter verses. It fits the mood well enough as the female lead vocals go back and forth between irked resignation and vocal frustration at how hard he’s making it to just let this thing go already. So I can appreciate that aspect of the song. The drums are a little more syncopated here than “The Hunger”, so the arrangement overall works slightly better for me, but I still get the nagging feeling that San Fermin isn’t putting its best foot forward by choosing singles that portray the band more as “guitar rock that happens to have some classical stuff in there”.
Grade: B-

7. The Living
Now this is the kind of song I’d release a a single, if I were the one making the decisions. While it might seem to get off to a slow start, with the wispy vocal harmonies that open it up, and the soft hum of keyboards and a thumping drum loop hinting at more of an electronic direction, the song establishes a pretty strong melodic hook early on, that is reinforced over and over again in Allen’s verses, the song’s big chorus, and the joyous instrumental refrain that finally breaks through in the bridge. I’m in awe at how efficiently San Fermin moves from the understated intro to the full-blast, yet still graceful performance they bring us when the song reaches a fever pitch. I’ll be humming that melody for days thanks to how beautifully the strings and horns reprise it as the drums gallop toward the song’s conclusion. (This is probably the best moment on the album for drummer Michael Hanf, who I’ve heard has talents that aren’t utilized as fully as they could be on this record, though it should be noted that he also contributes other percussion instruments such as the glockenspiel and vibraphone when not behind a drum kit.) Although the lyrics speak of night-dwelling creatures coming out of their hovels to honor the head, the song ultimately acknowledges that these rituals are for us, the living, to remember what those lives were worth, and it turns out to be an incredibly graceful and moving celebration of life, and the refusal to let darkness, tragedy, or even the looming threat of death itself put a damper on it. It’s exactly the song I needed to hear in these stressful times.
Grade: A+

8. The Myth
The harp is front and center as the first half of the album winds down. This delicately delicious piece of music really reminds me of something from Timbre‘s album Sun & Moon, also an attempt by a classically-trained composer to bridge the gap between traditional baroque instrumentation and modern day singer-songwriter fare. Before I even notice any lyrics, I’m swept away by the sheer ambiance of this one, with one of the two female vocalists singing lead while the other gently hums in the background, as if rocking a baby to sleep. The imagery from the album’s first track comes full circle here, as if the cormorant that served as an omen of impending death has finally come to collect, but the tone is one of warmth and assurance, as if you’re being welcomed into a truly peaceful eternal state, rather than simply ceasing to exist. I’m surprised by how many colors emerge in the lyrics – birds of brilliant white, a bay glowing in an amber sunset, ships in an orange sky, bright yellow lemons slowly drying up on a tree. All of this feels like a mantra, a set of phrases invoked to ward off the fears of death and finally accept the notion of letting go. the song seems to build off of the idea presented in “The Living” as she briefly honors those who have gone before her: “I would sing for their lives, if knew the words”. At the end of the song, the phrase shifts to “I would sing for my life“, and suddenly I have no words. (What? I’m not crying, you’re crying!)
Grade: A

DISC TWO

9. Swamp Song
The second disc opens with one of the album’s most playful songs, with syncopated drums and the blurting of a saxophone immediately giving it a different feel from anything we heard on disc one. Swamps are often depicted as dirty and foreboding places, but this song portrays the swamp as buzzing with life, and serving as a welcome respite from the dreariness of city life. Ellis’s lyrics, as sung beautifully by Karlie and Claire, reveal a love of internal rhymes and wordplay, with lines like “Holy heady hellgrammites hunting in the bog at night” and “Water sloshes your galoshes.” The joy of traipsing around a swamp and not caring how dirty you get in the process reminds me of how little kids love to play in the mud. When the song concludes on the line “Just don’t meet the cormorant!”, I can only take in the context of the last few songs on disc one, where meeting the cormorant equals the end of a person’s life; I’m imagining that the flashback to one’s youth is being invoked in order to stave off the aging process and the arrival of that winged reaper.
Grade: A-

10. Westfjords
Evoking images of one of the “bucket list countries” that I would personally love to visit at some point in my lifetime is certainly a good way to ensure that I pay attention to a song. Ellis wrote a good chunk of the album while vacationing in Northwest Iceland, with this song being titled after a rather remote part of the country, a mountainous peninsula that sticks out like tendrils into the ocean, appearing on a map as though the island had sprung a leak. His lyrics, once again sung with beautiful restraint by Allen, reflect the solitude of that location, while also grappling with his more introverted nature being at odds with the personalities of his friends. He questions whether his tendency to ruminate on heavier topics like aging and death is “Whipping up emotions too deep for your friends”, and whether he spent his youth “Growing old while all the rest of us were growing up.” While the instrumentation doesn’t stand out to me on this one – it’s more in the vein of pleasant, mid-tempo acoustic pop – I can say that I love how both the male and female vocalists are utilized here, with the two women taking a snippet of the lyrics and running with it as a counterpoint to Allen’s last few choruses. The melodic hook might not stand out as readily as something like “The Living”, but I love that I’m getting two memorable refrains here for the price of one.
Grade: B+

11. Do Less
The only one of the short interludes to feature actual lyrics is this minute-long song, which is the first moment on the album where the vocals strongly remind me of Lucius. It’s really just the two women and some light percussion – hand claps, finger snaps, a tambourine, stuff like that. The lyrics read like a self-mocking rebuttal to the previous song, basically Ellis speaking to himself from someone else’s perspective, and saying I love you man, but you’re kind of harshing my mellow with all these drawn-out meditations on death. I suppose if you’re going to tell yourself that less is more, then writing such a short song that aptly sums up the value of doing so is certainly on point.
Grade: B

12. Little Star
My favorite song on the second disc is the one where I could swear I’ve suddenly switched to a Sylvan Esso record. The lead vocal sounds so much like Amelia Meath that it’s scary. Not that the music sounds particularly electronic or glitchy like Sylvan Esso’s usual – but shoot, they just recently put out a live album that reimagined a lot of their songs in more of a “live ban with horns and stuff” sort of configuration, so a tune like this would totally be in their wheelhouse, I think. (Genius, despite its copious credits for the instrumentation on this song, maddeningly doesn’t make it clear which of the vocalists is actually singing lead here.) The lyrics seem to describe a woman addressing an idealized version of herself – a genius, a star, a queen, someone whom everyone else wants to emulate. Musically, this is a tight little three-minute pop song in modest clothing, starting out with just light drums and piano, and very smoothly bringing in the strings, horns, and female backing vocalists as time goes by, all without overtly trumpeting the simple yet magical hook at is core. It’s sung with a delicate sense of wonder to it, almost as if it’s a lullaby being sung to a precocious young child who has the potential to grow up to be any damn thing she wants.
Grade: A

13. Berkley Bridge
This track feels a bit disjointed – like two interludes, one instrumental and one vocal, got smushed together. The first part gives me a sense of deja vu, like I’ve heard the melodies coming from the piano and the swelling horns somewhere before (which I only noticed after several listens to the record). It reminds me vaguely of how The River Empires did this throughout the sprawling two-disc Epilogue (sadly, the only album they ever made). The second half keeps the piano as lead instrument, which is appropriate since it describes a childhood memory that occurred while a young boy’s mother was driving him to piano lessons. The lyrics are parceled out slowly, and there’s not a whole lot to it, but the one clear image we get ties in strongly with the rest of the record – while crossing a bridge in the chilly winter fog, a black, snakelike creature is briefly glimpsed in the water. Normally I’d take this to be a reference to a mythical creature such as the Loch Ness Monster. But look at the album cover, and how those two cormorant necks loop around and merge into each other, instead of either one having an actual body. This song has got to be referencing that image – which apparently means this poor kid saw an omen of his own death when he was far too young to understand it.
Grade: B-

14. Freedom (Yeah Yeah!)
The album’s biggest pop song is up next – I mean, it’s “pop” by San Fermin’s introverted indie-classical standards, but it’s still quite atonal shift from the last few songs when the twin female vocalists immediately jump in with their refrain assuring us they’re too busy living life to be worried about death. (Yes, I know these singers aren’t actual twins – neither are the two ladies from Lucius, but I can’t help but wonder if they got the idea to present themselves as such from their time in this band.) As you might gather from the title, this song is a happy little breath of fresh air, a sort of emotional turning point for the record, where the looming fear of death that has hung like a millstone around Ellis’s neck as he wrote a great many of these songs is finally cast off. The song directly addresses the imagery and mythology that’s been interpreted as a warning or a grave omen up until this point: “We can live and let it live/We don’t need some kind of myth/Turning seabirds into sirens.” As the cheery shouts of “Yeah yeah!” begin to come to a boil, and the strings and horns build up in a classy, joyful celebration of life around them, I’m struck by how quickly this record has managed to change its outlook, moving from a place of resigned fatalism to one of defiant hope, declaring an absolute refusal to let some sort of legend from long ago dictate the outcome of one’s life in the here and now.
Grade: A-

15. Waterworld
No, this song isn’t about the legendary box office bomb starring Kevin Costner. It took me a while to realize it, but this one is definitely the emotional climax of the record, even if it makes the change of mood on “Freedom” sound rather abrupt in context. As Allen returns to the final for the final time on the record, he sings along to a piano melody that I now realize was being foreshadowed in the opening of “Berkley Bridge”. This time, instead of a child looking out at the water from a bridge and seeing something scary emerging from it, he seems to be a older boy, possibly the same age as the teenage character whose point of view we heard in “Summer by the Void”, and he’s describing water in more of a metaphorical sense, noting that he and his girlfriend are different from their peers, and have a sort of predisposition toward sadness that makes it feel like they’re living life underwater. The band does a great job of bringing things to a climactic boil, as the drum rolls begin to kick in later in the song, the horns and strings begin to circle around the whirlpool of melancholy that the lyrics are describing, the female vocalists once again offer compelling counterpoints to Allen’s lead. I’m conflicted as the song comes to a close – I’m not sure whether to feel sad for this young woman whose mood is suppressed by the ravages of an ongoing depression no matter where she goes or how much the other people in her life love and admire her, or encouraged by the support and kinship being offered by the young boy at her side. And that’s sort of the duality that’s existed rather uneasily throughout this record. Are we moody introverts better off alone, or is it worth it to engage in relationship with others who bring us up even if we fear bringing them down? Is it better to face our fear of death with frank realism, or to defy it when it threatens to hold us back from truly living our lives? The Cormorant has presented us with both sides of that coin, and I have to say that it’s done quite well at this despite the mood whiplash that sometimes occurs as a result of it.
Grade: B+

16. Tunnel Mt.
The concluding instrumental is a puzzling one. Like “Hickman Creek” before it, it feels like a snippet of a larger composition that was never fully realized, and I can easily imagine this as an interlude on an old Sufjan Stevens record. Having it at the end is truly strange, though – I’m guessing it’s meant as a reprise of themes heard earlier in the record, since the horns remind me vaguely of “Swamp Song” and the wordless vocals ever-so-briefly bring “Berkley Bridge” to mind. There are some voices whispering in the background unintelligibly, too. Noticeably there are no bird calls, despite them appearing as a background element in several other tracks, so I’m wondering if the voices are meant to replace the birds – maybe these are voices from beyond the grave trying to tell us something that we’re not understanding? The album is definitely closing out with a reminder that there’s probably a lot here which I still don’t understand. I’m fine with that. It keeps me listening.
Grade: C+

WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
The Cormorant $1.50
Cerulean Gardens $2
Hickman Creek $.25
The Hunger $.50
Summer By the Void $1
Saints $.75
The Living $2
The Myth $1.75
Swamp Song $1.50
Westfjords $1.25
Do Less $.50
Little Star $1.75
Berkley Bridge $.75
Freedom (Yeah Yeah!) $1.50
Waterworld $1.25
Tunnel Mt. $.25
TOTAL: $18.50

BAND MEMBERS:
Ellis Ludwig-Leone: Composer, piano, keys, percussion
Allen Tate: Vocals, guitar
Claire Wellin: Violin, vocals
Karlie Bruce: Vocals
Tyler McDiarmid: Guitar, bass
Aki Ishiguro: Guitar
Michael Hanf: Drums, percussion, glockenspiel, vibraphone
Stephen Chen: Saxophone
John Brandon: Trumpet

LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:

MORE USEFUL LINKS:
http://www.sanferminband.com/
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