KULA SHAKER Pilgrim’s Progress (2010)

28 June 2010
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Peter Pan is dead. The echo of the shock while realizing this resounds in the enervating loneliness of “Pilgrim’s Progress”. Grab and sunflower and welcome to the funeral. Your footsteps may sound the park, there is none near, the most the cracking twigs and the whispers of the litter to blend with the bared to pain music of Kula Shaker emptied of its ones splendid ornaments, wrapped only with the simple robe of melancholy that suits it so well. In 2010 the British have left the vivid and rich decoration of their songs, that blast of spellcraft and fairytales that seemed to be taken out of the sixties, a firework of the musical happiness. In “Pilgrim’s Progress” we rarely meet something more than a harmonica or a string orchestra, the sitar is almost forgotten and the Indian sticks are only a reminding scent which calls up not smiles and rapturous leap but a surprising tear at the tail of the eye. Kula Shaker have grown older, their songs do not burn with the impulse and the energy of the hippie gust but they bear not less impacting emotion of the parting with the childhood and the meeting with the new. “Peter Pan R.I.P” sang the end of the child years, we pricked up ears and Kula Shaker threw us in an unexpected spiral swirling again through the music of passed decades but the serious and sad music, not liable to pomposity and furor. “Ophelia” is a tender ballad whose distant flute reaches to “Stairway To Heaven”, but instead the blast from the second part from the hymn of the Gods, we receive the harmonica of Bob Dylan. Destination “Modern Blues”? “Only love” will take you there and the love of Crispian and his companions to the sound and the culture of the 60s still flows from the music of Kula Shaker but this time the nostalgia caress other strings of perception, “Ophelia” lies naked on the melody of the acoustic guitar and voice while someone’s future beloved dresses seductively, puts on perfume and sinks into the night, “All Dressed Up (And Ready To Fall In Love)”. “Ruby” and “Barbara Ella” are holding hands, moving in the bubbling trills of an evergreen band or a rockabilly orchestra, they are drifting fragile like a crack of an old vinyl, they blink in a black and white screen noise before they fade in the exotic melody of “When A Brave Needs A Maid” which carries prairie dust and handful of Asian spices, an instrumental, uniting the scope of the West and the mysteries of the East. And at the end there comes the winter of the human life, quietly, gently, like snowflakes on the window, falling down to heap snow-drifts to burst in a Pink Floyd-like freezing blizzard and Roger Waters-like drama in the finale of the album and the closing “Winter’s Call”. Peter Pan is dead. Cry for him, for yourself and may he Rest in… Peace!
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