Oren Lavie
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Oren Lavie

| INDIE

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Band Alternative Singer/Songwriter

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The best kept secret in music

Press


"Outstanding debut album sung with the sweetest of voices, rich textures and melodies, crafted with a unique songwriting style."


First impressions are important, and within the first seconds of listening to this I simultaneously got hooked and fell in love. “Her Morning Elegance” is the opening track, with rising strings, vibraphone, barely-there drums and fragile melodies: compelling and absorbing. The lone voice is clear, but sounds as if he’s hardly trying to be heard. That bare, intimate voice is that of Oren Lavie; a man with a more interesting life story than most: the Israeli born musician taught himself to play piano, and moved to London to write plays. After two of his productions were brought to the stage he moved to New York and learnt guitar due to the absence of space for his piano. Songs were accumulating fast, so he found himself in Berlin, a place to disappear and record his songs at his own pace.
The result is this collection of stunningly beautiful songs, on the hushed side of quiet, which latch onto your ears and heart. Think Jose Gonzalez but more complex, delicate layers of sound. The semi-acoustic arrangements really capture a moment of time, a feeling, a thought. A lusciously deep acoustic guitar hypnotises in “Trouble Don’t Rhyme” – a simple, reassuring tune with unusual melodies and every note in its right place. Oren Lavie’s sensual tone of voice, is mellowed out, calm and assured. He doesn’t need to announce the chorus, the songs just flow and the layers that he painstakingly recorded bit by bit roll along with the perfectly written lyrics – rhymes that bring rhythm, accomplished and poetic: placed to enhance the intimate mood that is reflected throughout.
It’s a hard record to describe. Unlike any of the current sweep of emo-shit, this is a man who has taken his time, isn’t in any rush, and has produced his own album to sound how it should sound. He’s not worried about fashions and scenes, he doesn’t need to be like anyone else, this is his work, completely personal and perfect. Mature, like a fine wine. Good things come to those who wait.
By: Katie Probert
editor@subba-info.com
- subba-cultcha UK


"A theatrical album of magical qualities and hidden meaning"



Maverick (* * * *)
February 2007

Immediately likeable and distinctive, Israeli born Lavie’s delicate blend of jazz pop is calmer and more smoothly delivered than a meditating ballet dancer on ice skates.
With a beautiful, soft voice, like Ray Lamontagne crossed with Norah Jones, he paints his lyrics like fairytale images. And gentle string arrangements give the feeling of gliding over hills and lakes like the Snowman.

Formerly a playwright, its not a surprise then, that a theatrical element also penetrates Lavie’s work; the jagged repetition of violins in the title track urging the song forward with a warning ‘That’s what they do to strangers you see/ That’s what they do to strangers you see/ on the opposite side of the sea’ like a musical allegory for kids.
But this is by no means an unsophisticated record. Quite the opposite. His dreamy soundscape in ‘Her Morning elegance’, ‘Ruby Rises’ and ‘A Short Goodbye’, disguise a silent nightmare, and you get the feeling that the song ‘Blue Smile’ isn’t about a smile at all. - Maverick (* * * *)


Discography

The Opposite side of The Sea, 2007 - Tuition

Photos

Feeling a bit camera shy

Bio

OREN LAVIE / THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE SEA

“A theatrical album of magical qualities and hidden meaning…”
Maverick UK – (* * * *)

“The whole is cinematic and mellow, like Nick Drake in a cheerful summer bonnet…”
Uncut, UK – (* * * *)

“An outstanding debut album sung with the sweetest of voices, rich textures and melodies, crafted with a unique songwriting style.”
Subba-cultcha UK

“The Beatles, Nick Drake and Crosby, Stills & Nash are some of the pleasant associations filling my senses as I listen to the debut album of Oren Lavie, and being astonished again and again and again."
GLITTERHOUSE

Oren Lavie began his career as a playwright and a theater director. At the age of 22, after having won a national award for his writing in his home Israel, he relocated in London and proceeded to write and direct two plays on London’s Off West-End stages, to enthusiastic reviews.

Two years later, he has moved to New York where he continued to write while trying to rise above the financial difficulties of mounting full-length plays of experimental nature. Being an accomplished pianist since an early age, Oren slowly began to shift his focus from theatre to a more compressed, personal format of storytelling – the song.
In 2003 he moved to Berlin to record a handful of songs which he has collected under the title ‘The Opposite Side Of The Sea’.

The album’s sparse, acoustic arrangements create the feeling of music recorded in Black & White, with each song depicted like a dreamy scene in a movie or a secret moment in a hidden bedroom. Oren's warm, low voice carries his melodies with ease and dry simplicity, blowing through wide images of city life and fictional landscapes, inhabited by lonely characters…

‘The Opposite Side of The Sea’ is a collage of fragile moments as much as it is a raw, uncompromising presence of a distinct voice.
It is a wide landscape locked in a small room, a bright blue sky with clouds approaching.

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www.orenlavie.com
www.myspace.com/orenlavie