Kula Shaker

★★★ 1st Congregational Church Of Eternal Love And Free Hugs STRANGEFOLK. CD/DL/LP

Epic scriptural concept by Crispian Mills’ psychedelic sergeants-at-arms.

Kula Shaker’s 2016 tour, celebrating 20 years since their chart-topping K album, underscored their primacy as a punchy live psych-pop combo. This, the fourth offering of their on-off millennial career, showcases their madder, more conceptual studio bent, taking the shape of – cough – a musical battle between St Michael and Lucifer, played out under the leaky roof of an English village church. Mills’ hammy sermons from the pulpit won’t palliate their critics’ ‘joke band’ barbs. But if you like the idea of Arthur (The Decline And Fall…), Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake

and S.F. Sorrow pulsed in a blender with pips of Strawberry Alarm Clock, gratings of Eddie Hazel and a sprinkle of fairy dust, then this won’t disappoint. Gingerbread Man is quite brilliantly barmy, Burning Down winsome Kinks-y folk rock, and bombastic final showdown After The Fall (Parts 2 & 3) both silly and clever.

Pat Gilbert