ARJUN - Gravity review

Year : 2016
Genre : Fusion Jazz
Label : Pheromone Records
Origin : United States
Official site: >here<

Arjun's latest full length release marks the completion of a massively improvisative fusion jazz trilogy that has started out with their 2013 outing "Space".

The ensemble has garnered considerable attention with their particular brand of polite harmonies and easily comprehensible rhythms, toppled by massively improvisative leads. The disc is a well balanced, introverted guided tour on sonic vistas that do not attempt to challenge the set of basic rules that will warrant a type of inevitable insant jazz fusion: the one which is immediately ready both to be played and to be listened to, once certain conditions are fulfilled.

As such, the music is joyful, riskless, and optimally naive in the sense that it does not attempt to demand the next to last trick of rampant musical imagination, instead, the album remains a stable, enjoyable guided tour on top of harmonies that reign relentlessly satisfied with their doubtless impressive anatomies, especially as they are courted with soloistic approaches that are equally quick to reveal the mechanics of thought and skills that summon them . Read on to know more.

As noted, Gravity, as an album, won't demand new chapters to be written into the history of jazz fusion, yet the agenda hardly was such, anyway: the handling of the instruments is indicative of an apt readiness to deliver consistently under the will and conventions of a certain rule-set, and the creative criterias of these considerations are met with restrained, polite elegance indeed.

Your mind will never be in any danger of being ripped out just to be re-arranged, and re-inserted. This very consideration though is not necessarily a negativity: this full lenghts doubtless reings among the perfect choices if the music you are going for is a demeanor of jazz fusion that does not demand your full fledged attention. Gravity deliberately won't pose such demands, because you always know what is going to happen next, as result of a particularly placid creative behaviour of playing around in a harmonic environment long enough as to wonder if the given setting is of any further interest and creative novelty yet - of course, this can be both a benefitial trait, or a hindrance, depending on your aim with the music.

I like and admire the crisp production values of the delivery. All instruments are nice and fuzzy, while being skillfully separated from each other, in an attempt to secure their anatomic volumetrics. All in all, the album is highly successful as a family friendly jazz fusion statement, yet you should not expect it to reinvent a single thing in the universe. If you are looking for a jazz fusion album that does not demand an effort on your part, then this is the ideal spin to hop on.

Check out Arjun at their official site here.

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