Thank you so much to Rockstar Weekly for this amazing review:

http://www.rockstarweekly.com/cd-review-ben-levin-grup-pulse-of-a-nation.html

“It takes a lot of gusto and ambition to make a concept album. Seamlessly melding together an album’s songs so they not only compliment one another but form a cohesive musical narrative as well. A daunting task to be sure but one that allows the artists a tremendous amount of creative freedom. Concept albums are by their very nature highly experimental pieces. For a band that claims on their website to have been “founded on the notion that there is still some unique noise to be made”, experimentation should be the name of the game. The Ben Levin Group is a Boston based alternative rock band with an artistic bent and a classical twist. Their third album to date, Pulse Of A Nation is haunting sonic chronicle of mankind coming to terms with an impending apocalypse.

For the next 72 hours, we will be recording our next album Invisible Paradise and finishing some of the tracking for Freak Machine and Bent Knee’s first album.  Invisible Paradise is my most classically influenced piece and it really stands out from everything else I’ve written.  I am excited to start tracking!  The recording schedule for the next three days at “The Record Company” in Boston will be really intense, check it out:

Here is a cool Ben Levin interview by Bart from Lords of Metal magazine:

Welcome and thanks for sending your record to us! Coming from the USA, have you ever been to Europe or are these your first steps in getting ready for a tour around here?
We haven’t made it out to Europe yet, but we certainly plan on getting a European tour going in the coming years. Right now we are just trying to get the word out to people.

Could you tell our readers some more about the genesis of the Ben Levin Group, and by extent also your own genealogy as a guitar player?
Since I was a kid I have always loved thinking up crazy stories. I tried making my own comic books, and really enjoyed movies and video games with great characters. Although I had been making weird noises on piano and saxophone for several years, it wasn’t until I started playing guitar at age fourteen that I reallized that music was the best way for me to tell stories. I became obsessed with guitar and wrote tons of music about all kinds of subjects. With a handheld four track recorder I wrote an album influenced by Jason Becker, Marty Friedman, and Steve Vai about Cain and Able from the old testament. I also wrote another guitar heavy album about a space ship that was supposed to save a portion of mankind before the sun exploded. I started bands and performed my music throughout high school, and when I started my first semester at Berklee College of Music, I formed Ben Levin Group. At first we played the music from our album ‘Departure’, which is a collection of short instrumental pieces each with their own mini story. However, after my first two years of school I got tired of writing that way and started composing long form forty minute sets at a time. These long pieces allowed me to better express myself and my stories because it is possible to develop musical themes over the course of an entire show rather than in a limited five minute window. So far I’ve written three of these forty minute epics which we perform at our shows now. ‘Pulse of a Nation’ is the first one I wrote, then there’s ‘Invisible Paradise’ and ‘Freak Machine’.

Now, to get done with the nasty question: I read your (interesting, by the way) report on auditioning for the Lady Gaga band. I couldn’t help but wonder what made you decide to do it. Was it the mere idea of touring the world? Or of getting your name known? Or do you also consider it to be good for you as an artist or guitarist? Feel free to elaborate on this question.

Check out this awesome video review of “Pulse of a Nation.” (They start talking about the album at 12:45)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lisxQbsAXJY

Here are some of our favorite quotes about the new album: