Search - Kula Shaker :: Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts

A Very high three stars that is.........

03/26/1999

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Kula SHaker are a great band and this is a good album. YOu just get the feeling that for every magical piece of music, theres another track which isnt so awe inspiring. "Shower your love" is pure genius yet something like "SoS" is pretty average. A lot of Inadian influence which isnt a bad thing. Yet they could have done without the horns. Nice album but not life changing."

The gods of rock & revolution for fun!

E. A Solinas | 04/18/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"First I thought I didn`t like this album as much as K, but now I know how wrong I was. 'Great Hosanna' is a perfect song with the most incredible intro. 'S.O.S.' truly has it, one of the best songs on the album! No bad songs on the album! I'll say '108 Battles' and 'Timeworm' are one of the best ones. PP&A is one of the best albums I've ever bought. Though I have to say this is not so mainstream as K was. Just buy this record, it's worth it!"

Shower your love on me

E. A Solinas | MD USA | 07/14/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Kula Shaker is a big of an oddity -- a 1990s band (recently reformed) that sounds like a classic psychedelic/Indian funk band from the sixties or seventies.



And their second album "Peasants Pigs and Astronauts is a seriously underrated little Britpop album, full of rich atmosphere, brilliant instrumentation, and a thick opulant blanket of Indian musical influence. Where else in modern music do you hear Sanskrit chants with blazing riffs?



It opens on a spacey, shimmering note, before seguing into the funky, catchy, wild "Great Hosannah." It's a surprisingly stirring song calling for all people to join together, because, Crispin Mills asks us a bit uncertainly, "Will we arise in our time/At the dawn of another meaning/Will we awake at the break of a great hosannah?"



It's followed by the sinuous, swirling rocker with a great name "Mystical Machine Gun." Then they follow it up with a slew of solid rock'n'roll, flavoured with a heavy Indian vibe -- psychedelic blues, roof-raising rockers, bouncy Doors-like pop with samples of thunder, soft acoustic ballads, and little yowling songs that cycle gently in chiming, colourful circles.



It came as a shock to me to learn that Kula Shaker (named after an Indian holy man, Kulasekhara) only formed in the mid 1990s. Listening to their sound and their socially critical lyrics, I thought they were a product of the sixties or seventies, whose music had stayed timeless.



But as I listened to it more, it became clear that this music was a more modern type. It has deliciously barbed, jagged riffs paired with cycling, ethereal guitars, even in mellow love songs like "Shower Your Love." And it's laced with bells, funky horns, eerie flutes, smashing drums, rippling retro keyboard and spacey synth. It's all woven tightly together, into pop songs with a dozen layers of sound. But they also do something a bit more recent, slipping in delicate samples of church bells, singing birds, and a weird little voice.



Crispian Mills has that retro flavour as well -- he pours his heart into his rough-sounding vocals, as he belts out everything from neo-psychedelic weirdness ("You're a wizard in a blizzard/A mystical machine gun") to tender love songs ("Shower your love on me/Don't make it so hard to cry"), and a few awkwardly phrased calls for revolution ("Well, I laugh and catch the sun/'cause it's gonna be revolution for fun").



The newly reformed Kula Shaker mishmash retro instrumentation, Indian funk and blazing rock'n'roll together in their second album, an underrated little Britpop gem."