San Fermin at Whelan’s, Wednesday 16th of April 2014

Hard to believe a few bored minds still bang on about “hipsters”. It’s the safe way of defining and deriding an audience for music that isn’t easily classifiable into post-punk revivalist or neo-folk or whatever else is hip-but-not-too-hip at the moment. San Fermin for their sins are such a band, who also get the label “baroque pop” stuck to them like cattle in a mart. If you have any accurate impression of what their music is like from those descriptions then you truly do deserve a soy latté.

Ellis Ludwig-Leone is the songwriter behind San Fermin, and his classically trained composing style makes use of a pop aesthetic to bridge two rather disparate forms of music-making. The extent to which he and his band succeeds at bridging this gap is the kind of question you would expect to be answered in a live setting.

Eight musicians step onto the Whelan’s stage, that is a drummer, a trumpet player, a saxman, an electric guitarist, a violinist/backup singer, Mr. Ludwig-Leone himself tucked away behind keys to the side of the stage, Allen Tate on shared vocals and in place of a conspicuously absent Rae Cassidy is Charlene Kaye, also on vocals. Quite a setup to be sure, Arcade Fire-esque in a way.

One thing that’s been said about San Fermin is that there are too many ideas in their music, and this is a fair criticism. Whereas Arcade Fire like to spread one idea out over the course of a seven minute song San Fermin try to squeeze loads of ideas into even less. So you have Tate expressing some sensitive emotion while Kaye does something complementary but the drummer is hammering away like mad and the sax is gone to funky-town while the keys are playing out a simple melody; and that’s only what half the band are doing.

Unlike Arcade Fire, where the music can reach points of lethargy due to repetitiveness, the main issue with San Fermin is we don’t know quite where to direct our attention. But it’s certainly not the worst problem to have, and it works incredibly well on a proper crowd-stunning ballad like Oh Darling, in which Tate’s familiar baritone sings a fugue to Kaye’s restrained and powerful pop singer vocals. When everything comes together in one forceful burst of energy as it does on Sonsick is when the band really justify their existence.

Sonsick, their most popular song, comes fairly early in the set, but the worry that things might peak too soon are dispelled when they perform new song Parasites with a comparably affecting amount of energy. These moments are tempered by less engaging ones, particularly those that rely too heavily on Tate’s vocals for. As well as his unique voice is used on Oh Darling, it doesn’t have the range to be the main focus of the music for extended periods. This is perhaps Ludwig-Leone’s classical influence at work, as that kind of singing would be more at home in a National Concert Hall show perhaps.

But the bottom line is that San Fermin know how to get down. Once the trumpet and sax crank up and the drums are in full flight and the bodies onstage disappear below the heads and arms of the crowd you’d feel the full force of this show would be lost in a more austere setting. San Fermin want the best of both worlds, and while it might be hit-and-miss at times, they can rock it with the best of them when the mood strikes, and that’s good enough.