Member:
yogibear
Date:
7/18/2004
Marcin Borowski - perkusja
Justyn Hunia - klawisze, glos
Leszek Mrozowski - bass
Bartek Zeman - gitara, glos
All right, a tough one. This is a group of young people who have just recorded their first album under the same name. They are a band from Krakow, Poland. The band themselves liken their music to "intellectual rock with fusion elements". They say "we have been playing for several years experimenting with original hybrid music which is quite challenging to be classified". I can also hear some elements of RIO jazz and avant-garde along with King Crimson and also some Gentle Giant.
This is a very good CD of interesting ideas and arrangements. They are like a combination of the complexities of Gentle Giant with the quirkier elements of King Crimson/Fripp mixed up in a blender with a shot of jazz. The music is unique, complex and challenging. It is also complicated and at times beautiful.
The lyrics (included in an English language lyric sheet) seem well thought out and apply to what many would encounter living in a communist country trying to make music. The vocalist sings in his native language and is very good; on one song another vocalist sings almost counterpoint to his lines like certain Gentle Giant songs. The harsh staccato delivery of the Polish dialect adds to this CD's quirkiness.
The songs are all very good and exhibit lots of nice ideas and touches. The guitar player is very versatile as he tends to mostly stay in the slightly louder clean area with some trem and chorus effects added. Every once in a while he will get heavy and rock out with some very well done Frippoid riffs and runs with distortion, these bits are really well placed and make this some very cool stuff. The keyboard player is also very good and he tends to stick with some el. piano and synth tones that sound vintage.
The first song has a bit where the keyboard and guitar do an interlocking figure similar to KC stuff circa Discipline. Very nice finger picked and plucked guitar bits are also effective and seem to be the guitar players favorite fortes/approaches.
My fave song is the 9:13 "szla-dzie(ajachta!)". This song mixes a nice descending motif after a loud cacophonous intro for its opening section. This motif gives way to the "Red like" guitar riff which is intermingled with the opening faster intro motif. So there are like two sections of music playing with varying time sigs ala Gentle Giant. A nice piano plays a rhythm figure with a loud clean guitar soloing and adding accents. There is an abrupt change in pace with a deliberate 4/4 drumbeat, almost martial in style, playing under a jazzy guitar section. The whole things goes very quiet for about 6 seconds and then the second motif with the mid tempo section of bass, drums and jazzy guitar re-enters and fades out. A wonderful piece of always shifting dynamics and tempo shifts.
Most of the songs here fall into the same type of flow like the song above. The person who plays the vibraphone does get to show his stuff on about 3/4ths of the CD and they are very good.
I made notes about all the songs but decided its really not needed. This is what all bands wish they could play. Progressive rock with influences from their fave bands and with slight touches of their homeland. What could be better than that? They even say, "We are aware of the small market potential for music such as ours. We hope fans of King Crimson, Porcupine Tree or Volapuk will become interested in our music and find something for themselves". This is very good music and deserves a larger audience to hear this challenging new melange of progressive music.
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