TRIPMUZE rating: 85/100
When the music stops people, that is usually when people unexpectedly experience beautiful music out of nowhere and music starts to play human emotional strings.
At one dark night, the music from speakers suddenly stopped all our bedroom motions on a mattress after the stereo automatically changed the album. The song was full of sentiments. Cinematic like an old lonely European movie in the 40s. A comical ending like Charles Chaplin movie. The voice was crying. Simply beautiful.
I knew that wasn’t American music, though the lyric was English.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Asaf Avidan”
“Asa…what?”
“uh-s-uh-f, AA-Viy-Dae-N”
“I’ve never heard of the name”
“He is from Israel”
“You said he?”
“Yes. That’s a guy”
Oh, I thought the vocalist was female. The voice was high for a man.
Guilty to the music, the album stole our bedroom sweetness, and we two momentary concentrated on the lonely melodies from speakers. Most of the songs were covered with pessimistic beauty. Theatrical and dramatic solitude. Totally not matched with heavy yet romantic activities but most of the songs were a great match with afterglow. What also matched with the sensitive melodies was the dry and emotional vocal like Janis Joplin. The vocal would instantly catch attention no matter what situation it was. The album gave us an additional pleasure to find amazing music beside the main purpose in the dark room.
That album, “Poor Boy/Lucky Man” by Asaf Avidan & the Mojos, was released more than 5 years ago in 2009. The song I introduced at the beginning was its first song, “Brickman”. Asaf Avidan is active as solo today and has released some albums after “Poor Boy/Lucky Man”. Still, this album gave me a strong impact in 2016. Good music doesn’t fade away no matter when we discover.
While the majority of songs consisted of sorrowful acoustic melodies, the album also has a variety of strong rock songs and progressive tunes like Queen. Asaf’s vocal vividly portrays life by changing tones accordingly.
Sometimes we find things unexpectedly. I think it’s a huge loss to ignore the unexpected. As well as that, I think ignoring high-quality music is a loss just because of less popularity and nationality. Asaf Avidan isn’t well known in the United States yet despite high popularity in his native Israel and Europe. And I didn’t know about him until this year. The opportunity reminded me once again that the world still had many unknown talented artists and great music. “Poor Boy/Lucky Man” is an example of good music doesn’t have a border.
Asaf Avidan & the Mojos, “Poor Man/Lucky Man” (iTunes/Spotify)
*Source of cover photo: http://www.asafavidanmusic.com
