This morning (Sunday), a new mini-album by Static and Ben El was surprisingly launched together with Omar Adam called “Apparently”. “Seemingly” includes three new songs by the trio, all produced by Jordi. This collaboration was almost inevitable. Both Omar Adam and Static and Ben El have in recent years become pop powers, who have managed to prove continuity despite periods of ups and downs.
The last year has been complex for Omar Adam and reached a negative climax if the release of the song “Cockatilla”, which suffered a barrage of angry reviews that failed to utter a single word of remorse on the part of the singer. Static and Ben El, on the other hand, reached a new high in their careers when their “Zero Effort” became one of the biggest hits the country has known in recent years alongside unsuccessful attempts to break out overseas.
When it comes to such successful and significant artists their collaboration is expected to produce a bombastic and spectacular hit. The feeling now is that one amazing and unusual hit failed to be created, so we got three not bad songs in its place. The first song “Don’t Just Turn Me On” and the third and final song “Seemingly” are very similar. Both combine electronic dance music and hip hop with some Mediterranean sounds, and mostly very non-innovative.
These two songs are classic static and Ben-El songs and ones that do not renew anything. When you compare them to a song like “Ripples” released by the duo almost 6 years ago, you can see that very little has changed since then. The productions became tighter, Static’s rap skills improved but the formula hardly changed. What the other songs also have in common is the fact that Omar Adam is simply superfluous in them. In both he was swallowed up under a bombastic production that did not suit him, and if the songs had come out without him they probably would not have been any less good.
The middle song “I Loved You” is the most prominent of the three. Like a kind of Israeli version of the eighties classics Just the Two of Us, “I Loved You” is a calm, pleasant and sweet disco song. In this song, Omar’s poetry gets a proper place at the front, while Ben-El’s role becomes superfluous. Despite this this song is definitely the best and perhaps the only one of the kind of album with the potential to become a significant hit.
If there is one thing that Static, Ben-El and Jordi had to learn from the phenomenal success of Zero Effort, it is that the audience is fed up with a fixed formula. The drops, the bits of the trap and the Mediterranean elements that occasionally come as if to go out of duty – all of these have already been exhausted. Audiences are more thirsty than ever for good pop music, but the standard has gone up. He looks forward to innovations and adventures.
Omar Adam’s collaboration with Static and Ben El spawned three not bad songs but did not bring in a real line. Omar Adam mostly passes as a third wheel with Static and Ben El clinging to their regular routine instead of finding the musical midpoint between them and him.