Chicago-based Maps and Atlases’ premiere album, “Tree, Swallows, Houses,” is a musical shotgun blast to the face, the barrel cocked and stocked with mind-blowing, exceedingly complex, jazz-like guitar licks coupled with earth-shattering drum patterns that parallel the dominance and authenticity of Zeppelin’s John Bonham or the bold, uninhibited patterns of jazz legend Art Blakely.

Already impressed? You should be.

Some settle and hastily toss the musical marvel that is Maps and Atlases into the genre “math-rock.” I disagree. This is math-rock on ecstasy, revealing a happier, lighter, more upbeat and seemingly “popular” sound.

Math-rock is typically identifiable with such bands as Hella and Sheffield’s (U.K.) 65daysofstatic, whose sound is distinctly dark, requiring a pensive, trance-like state to fully grasp the complexities of the art.

However, Maps and Atlases is, for lack of a simpler descripton, happy. The music is spasmodic, prone to sudden outbursts of emotion and fun, causing your head to spin and your jaw to drop, but simultaneously causing your hips to shake and your mind to twinge with thoughts like “How?,” “What?” and “Whoa!”

Completely transforming an overly glamorized method of guitar presentation that was unfortunately exploited to extinction by 1980s glam bands, Maps and Atlases fuses its sound and takes finger tapping to a different level.

As soon as the seven-track EP starts, instantly the sheer virtuosity and frenetic composure of the group has already flown over your head. Dave Davison’s infectious high-pitched, shrill vocals initially taint the musical experience. I even had the audacity to cringe once. However, toward the end of the four-minute track, “Everyplace Is a House,” I found myself defending his shrills, claiming they were signs of character and originality.

The lyrics are at times inaudible beneath Davidson’s vocal stylings.

But when you acquiesce to your desire to look them up, you will find the lyrics just as eclectic and overwhelming as the instrumentation.

Lyrics like “picking flowers…black-and-white bathing suit…curious as a bee” have audiences questioning the band’s sanity. Maps and Atlases’ childlike poetry reinforces the fact that the band breaks the mundane, droning, scientific mold of math-rock.

This album will leave any avid music connoisseur with an adrenaline rush and a newfound confusion for the limits, or lack thereof, of music as we know it.

On the other hand, the album might leave you with a tremendous headache.

All in all, “Tree, Swallows, Houses” scares the hell out of me, as it reveals the beautiful musical complexities that are lost on our modern music culture. The album provides mind-enhancing, lightning-fast finger tapping runs that sequence into place, gracefully if you choose to accept the nonsense.

Upon further exploration of this short but sweet EP, you’ll travel beyond the grandiose guitar playing and realize the complementary complexities of both the drums and the bass, played by Texas native Chris Hainey and the ingenious bassist, Shiraz Dada.

The bar has been raised, my friend, and it’s been raised incredibly high. So I bid adieu to the ongoing horrible scene dominated by Clear Channel broadcasts.

Let the musical scramble to even enter the midst of Maps and Atlases begin.