Avi Rosenfeld 2013
Very Heepy Very Purple
Paying tribute to his favorite bands, Israeli guitarist breaks out of the loop of obviousness.
Hailing from the family of rock aficionados, it was a little surprise that Avi Rosenfeld picked up a guitar in his teens and has come up with more than a dozen albums up to now. More surprising is the fact that some of these recordings are the result of finding kindred spirits on the online pastures, and that he’s not yet been roped in by a name band. Wearing the titular influences on his sleeve, Avi doesn’t falls into mimicking his heroes, but produces his own kind of non-shredder virtuosity and weaves an acoustic thread into many tracks here to contrast traditional heaviosity on cuts like the brilliant “Rain Shadow” or “Into The Battle”.
Heroic, if tempered and Hammond-hooked, bombast marks opener “Trumpets Of War” and epic “Land Of The Nile”, both featuring guest singers in a power metal setting, yet there’s a delicate texture to “The One Who Will Be King”, which grows from an exquisite folk ballad into a mesmerizing sand-sprayed tapestry, as Rosenfeld’s own simpler voice shifts the focus to his instrumental talents. Given the main man provenance, the commonplace Eastern motifs sound authentic, despite klezmer sax smut on “Yemei Ha-Hanukkah” and a demo-ish feel to a couple of undermixed passages, and there’s a kamikaze-dervish swirl to the Beethoven-quoting “Noflim El HaTehom”, delivered in Hebrew. So, once the blues “Wake Up” signs it off with Avi rising to the vocal challenge, an aftertaste remains of a high-class journey to the very heart of hard rock lore.
****1/2
