KUNDABUFFER

This exciting debut by Sympozion draws from various jazz, rock and avant-garde styles - Gentle Giant, Frank Zappa and Steve Reich are the first influences to come to mind - and it somehow remains catchy and fun despite the complexity. Avant-garde music has a tendency to be tuneless and difficult to enjoy, but here the quanitity of avant-garde is just right and the result is an adventurous, intelligent, quirky set of songs that don't require endless effort to appreciate.

The album opens up with Patterns, which is a blast. It starts with some keys and each repetition adds a new instrument or two to develop a crazy main theme loaded with polyrhythm and counterpoint. The crazy thing, though, is that this music is catchy, upbeat, and completely memorable. This song thrilled me. It's available on this site, and I highly recommend you put 3 1/2 minutes of your life toward hearing this song. Despite being the shortest song on the album, it is easily the best. It'll click with you right away too; Immediacy is a good thing.

While it may be a disappointment that none of the following songs reach the unexpected heights of the first track, there is still plenty to enjoy in them. The second track, Happy War Holiday, is another fun piece that, in it's longer length of 8 minutes, shows the band able to extend a song with more digressions and riffs. Bird is one of two tracks featuring vocals, which are sung in Hebrew. They are pretty nice, too. Grapefruit, one of the first songs composed by the group, really shows their avant-garde and Gentle Giant-esque sides off, and in good fashion. The second half of the album is arranged like the first one (a short-long-short-long song pattern), though this half is a bit longer. More great music can be found here, especially in the extended tracks Zona (the other piece with vocals, though there are much less here), and the closer Grapefruit Variations, which despite its name is much more than a variation of riffs from Grapefruit.

All in all this is a fantastic debut from a very talented band. They love polyrhythms and counterpoint, and I can't say I've heard either done in such a fun way before. They use a recorder occasionally and a guest flautist appears on three tracks which are nice fluorishes to their solid core. With only an occasional lull here and their in the awesomeness, this stands as a great start, one that can be appreciated regardless of the listeners background.