Ari Hest – Official Site
Ari Hest on MySpace

NYC-native Ari Hest released The Green Room Sessions, a collection of tunes crafted with Apple’s GarageBand on a laptop in his Brooklyn apartment, mere days before the Christmas holiday. This collection of bluesy rock tunes finds the singer-songwriter growing into the accomplished musician so many already assumed him to be, but that many feared would get lost in the shuffle when he signed to Columbia.

An NYU graduate, Hest once again demonstrates his skill as a performer, delivering a skillful and moving interpretation of the Fleetwood Mac classic “Little Lies” as part of this five-song set. The reason for the brevity: The Green Room Sessions comes a few months before Hest’s second Columbia Record’s release and proper follow up to his 2004 album, Someone to Tell. Evidently, Hest was more interested in the art than the business side of things, merely hoping to progress creatively while working out some of those “two years of gigging” kinks.

Clocking in around seventeen minutes, The Green Room Sessions, a name taken from the primary color of Hest’s makeshift studio, gives listeners a glimpse of the work “around the bend.” Fans of bluesy singer-songwriters will find a lot to like here and, hopefully, there will be much more to shout down to the masses. This sampling of raw talent and polished musicianship curbs the appetite of a voracious music fan, tiding them over for Hest’s pending “main course.”

Ari Hest is an artist worth checking out, worth knowing. Every critic wants to be a musician; every musician a critic. In this instance, the artist proves to be his toughest pundit, pushing himself to levels previously unimagined before his GarageBand project. Never have five songs said so much about the direction of an artist’s career while providing so very little. Hest keeps his cards to his chest here, not willing to share all the secrets he discovered a few feet from the kitchen. The work here is simple, clean and surprisingly tight for a one-man show.

Head to iTunes (or Awarestore) and download this EP.

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