ZEE AVI - Zee Avi

Like any other modern-day Internet fairytale, Kina Grannis, Aria Tesolin, Brendan MacFarlane and Marie Digby all have one thing in common, the popularity that came along after posting their talents on YouTube. and heres one from our very own shore, former fashion student turned strummer, Zee Avi.

Twenty three-year-old Avi from Miri was expected to follow a career path toward being a lawyer. In her teens she took up guitar, often spending hours locked in her room practicing.

She put music aside for four years during which she went to London to study fashion design. But back in Kuala Lumpur, she got back to her music, and starting writing songs and playing with a band.

One of her friends missed her first gig where she played her first original song Poppy and asked her to send the song over to him. Avi didn’t know how, but did have this webcam on her dad’s laptop and one of those call centre headsets. So she ended up putting it on YouTube.

After her friend watched it, she was going to delete it video, but was persuaded to let it be, and “see what happens”.

She remember getting one comment and was so happy. Then she put her second video up and got three comments. It just went on from there.

Avi’s natural magnetism to the instrument led her to write and record her own songs and post them on YouTube.

One day, a guy from Monotone Records messaged her on YouTube, saying they were interested in talking. Next thing she knew, they had a rough draft of the recordings.

Her love of music — and of the Malay melting pot — is reflected in her self-titled debut album, Zee Avi, offered up by Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records as “an exotic vaudeville entertainment from the other side of the world”, and justifiably so.

The songstress is making the most of her opportunity to sport new material by displaying her unique voice and soft sound. Having amassed so many cultural influences by the time she began studying art in London, it was no surprise that lovely and diverse songs began to spill out of her.

Most of hers songs are about relationships, and as anyone knows relationships aren’t always sunshine and rainbows. Even when it’s good, sometimes it’s bad.

Avi tries to capture the reality of it. It can be a fairy tale, but it doesn’t always end up happily ever after. It it sets the theme for the rest of the album — almost wistful, but darkness permeates the lyrics.

With an opening song like Bitter Heart, where Avi describes the emotional roller-coaster of a love gone wrong while strumming upbeat-poppy rhythms, listeners are assured of a relaxing journey.

Her songs bring a tremendous amount of visual interpretation, creating an instant connection between Avi and her listeners, displaying the amount of emotional dedication Avi put into the album for the audience.

The bouncy composition called Darlin’ It Ain’t Easy, she is the one who dumps the guy, while on another take on a breakup comes on I Am Me Once More, the protagonist finds herself liberated after the dissolution of the affair.

Easily one of the standout tracks on the album, Poppy grabs the attention instantly from the first clicks of Avi’s fingers as she watches a lover succumb to opium addiction, blithely trilling...

“He used to love German Expressionism films / But now he drinks until he falls … the poppy took my baby away from me.”

In the gentle ukulele-plucked Just You And Me, she outlines the beginning of a breakup with a lilting...

“You were sitting at the coffee table where you were reading Kierkegaard / Minutes later you proceeded to say something that almost broke my heart.”

She stirs things up with the same dash of attitude in her cover of Interpol’s Slow Hands and Morrissey’s First Of the Gang to Die, in which the tale of tough is made poignant through Avi’s crooning and spaciously strummed-out acoustic guitar, while Honey Bee hints at Avi’s youth and bubbly personality.

Her self-expression comes through linguistically in the ukulele-based song Kantoi — where Avi takes a snappy cheater’s tale and turns it into contemporary folk-pop with attitude — a song sang in “Manglish” (a hybrid language of Malay and English).

It’s not pure Malay, but it’s a modern take on how everybody speaks now — a testament to Avi’s delivery that the song’s narrative emerges, despite the language barrier. And probably the pioneering song that will introduce Maglish to the world.

Avi, like other strong-voiced musicians before her has the both the power of quirk and the raw but sweet talent to make her voice stand out without having to raise it.

Her standout take on the ukelele, breathing contemporary life into it from being a mere island folk instrument, is refreshing.

From this delightful gem of an album you can tell shes going places.

Jazzy, trendy, smart and witty. Get your copy Now! — NST