The Best Pessimist - Walking With Happiness

This is a reoccurring tale on his blog; listening to music at work, and I go down rabbit hole listening to instrumental music with a focus on guitar. Maybeshewill, God is an Astronaut, Explosions in the Sky, and Followed by Ghosts, are all examples of this. There is a fifth band of such nature that I listen to frequently, and it is high time I rambled about them; The Best Pessimist.

The Best Pessimist is a solid example of the benefits of the internet for discovering music. Back in my day when we had to rely on the radio, there was no chance that any of the bands I mentioned in the opening paragraph would receive any play. The videos for The Best Pessimist have a healthy number of views, so they have an audience, but they are the sort of band that I cannot help but feel are rather obscure. I mean, you, whoever is reading this, assuming you did not google “The Best Pessimist” to get here, you probably never heard of this bad correct?

Speaking of obscure, The Best Pessimist have no Wikipedia page. This is always sign to me, that this is an independent operation. Thankfully there are always other ways of finding information on the “all human knowledge in one place device” so I learned from their bandcamp.com site that:

“The Best Pessimist is a one-man-band project formed in 2009 by the Ukrainian musician and composer Sergey Lunev. His music is a lovechild of genres like post-rock, ambient, idm. Piano driven atmospheric musical landscapes may remind you: The American Dollar, French Teen Idol and Mono.”

Maybe I need to check out those other bands The Best Pessimist are supposed to remind me of.

The extra same description can be found on other music sites where The Best Pessimist has posted his music; so unfortunately, that is about all I know about The Best Pessimist. Nonetheless, that is a good start. I do not believe I have ever discussed a Ukrainian musical group on here before.

In the spirit of past reviews, I love the ambient calming but also exciting sounds of guitar focused music that The Best Pessimist offers. Due to a lack of lyrics, and also a consistent style, I find myself struggling to distinguish one song from another by this band, however this is not a criticism, at least not in this example, because I have a high level of enjoyment for all The Best Pessimist songs, and will find myself listening to twenty to thirty of his songs in a row whenever I do decide to listen to The Best Pessimist. They songs are consistently good. However, there is one song of theirs that did manage to stand out from the rest, for me, and that is “Walking with Happiness.”

Now I love piano almost as much as I love the guitar, and those two instruments take turns in “Walking with Happiness,” like a professional wrestling tag team. The piano opens the song and commands the melody, but the guitar performs the same function after that, and they go back and forth, trading roles of melody and harmony.

Now, I am not formally educated in music, so I struggle to breakdown music on a technical level, I just know what I enjoy and what I think subjectively sounds good, but even my untrained ear can tell there is some mastery balance in the song writing for a song like “The Best Pessimist.” Sometimes I complain about instruments’ sounds clashing, like when a bass player or rhythm guitarist decides they are the melody and did not bother to inform the rest of a band, the results can typically disastrous. In “Walking with Happiness” the cooperation of the piano and guitar is one of the greatest strengths of the song. Both instruments take center stage and take a bow to each other at intelligently thought out intervals. Other The Best Pessimists songs do similar impressive things, but “Walking With Happiness” imbodied this better then any other; at least in my opinion.

I mentioned the ambience earlier, and how wonderfully “Walking With Happiness” draws us into a soothing garden of joy. The sounds of the guitar and the piano do not just sound great, they feel good. This song uplifts me without saying a word. Which is ideal for an instrumental song.

After all my time reading, writing, and dissecting lyrics, it is safe to say, I am a man of words, so unavoidably I am curious about band names and song titles, especially for instrumental bands. “The Best Pessimist” I think it is a charming name. I like to think that the best among pessimists would be a high functioning pessimist, who while negative, finds a way to navigate life successful, and that idea of a person, makes me happy. We do not judge people by the burdens they carry, we judge them by how they carry them, and if a self admitted pessimist can make the best of things, and be the best of themselves, that warrants a certain high level of respect. When I combine this thinking with the song title of today’s review “Walking With Happiness” I cannot help but pin the two together and this reinforces my idea that The Best Pessimist, metaphorically, is a negatively minded person successfully forging a happy life. Which makes the experience of listening to this mellow music even more joyous.

If we cannot happiness within ourselves, then we should try to find a way to surround ourselves with it. Make mirth your companion and walk with happiness.

- King of Braves