Kula Shaker
Pilgrim's Progress

"Peter Pan, he won't come back

They chained his feet and broke his back

I'm crying, remembering the days

Crying sweet tears of joy, remembering the days

Games that we played"

Fourteen years have already passed since that explosive debut known as "K", when Kula Shaker forcefully established themselves on the world music scene as the new promise of British rock. It feels like yesterday... yesterday when I rushed to buy that album, skipping school that morning and many others thereafter, being swept away by the sound and the Indian (and admittedly, a bit kitsch) psychedelia of those four boys who emerged from nowhere and nearly cost me my final year of high school and all the good reputation and esteem I had enjoyed in the previous four years. The fact is that from then on, I started caring less and less about Herodotus and Seneca and keeping a high average in all subjects. I even became a vegetarian because of Kula Shaker, and I showed up for my final exams worryingly emaciated and grumpy as a convict on his last day of prison. I barely survived...

Since then, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge for the band of Crispian Mills and Alonza Bevan, and often the waters were murky and rough to the point where, with navigation becoming impossible, Kula Shaker had to stop and catch their breath to avoid a miserable end, reflect, disband, and understand the path to take once they recovered the humility they had lost after making such a big splash so young, and always being under the influence of some drug, especially the worst of them all: money and success. The greatest difficulty for this band was, and still is, to break free from their freaky and colorful image, not even so vaguely nostalgic and indebted to the Sixties, for which with every new album release (only four in truth, since 1996), some last-minute music critic jumps up, pointing fingers and accusing them of being too derivative. I think that, as usual, it all depends on the angle from which each phenomenon is evaluated and especially, in this case, on the intellectual honesty of the reviewer in question. Let me explain, in every Kula Shaker album, it is all too obvious, true, the influence of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, sometimes Crimson, Jethro Tull, but also the American Grateful Dead and the more acidic Dylan ("Modern Blues"), but what is wrong with that...until proven otherwise Kula Shaker are 100% English and a certain type of sound is absolutely congenial to their cultural DNA? What is there to be surprised about? Crispian Mills is not the singer of Le Vibrazioni, and he can naturally draw from his roots and the music of his childhood, which is probably also the music of the childhood of every more or less young or old English person, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

He succeeds with a candidness and a naïveté today more than ever truly disarming, in line with the general mood of the album dedicated to the figure of a Peter Pan dead because he grew up and lost all hope ("Peter Pan R.I.P.", inspired by Andrew Birkin's book "JM Barrie & The Lost Boys")...; this time particularly striking is an unsuspected elegiac and melancholic vein for the Kula Shaker of the past...the boys have grown up, as my beard has grown over the years and the disillusionment in the better world I had dreamed of in that glimpse of the end of the millennium. Thus, almost entirely abandoning dangerous hard rock/sitaristic digressions, in "Pilgrim's Progress" acoustic guitars, strings, flutes, and cellos take center stage ("Ophelia"). And it is no coincidence that precisely in the two episodes where the Fender returns with circular riffs ("Figure It Out") or Barrett-esque resentments ("Barbara Ella"), the album suffers, in my opinion, from a slight drop in tension promptly picked up, fortunately, in the three dramatic final episodes from the Celtic-like instrumental "When a Brave Needs A Maid", and the very sad "To Wait Till I Come" and "Winter's Call", the latter with a spine-chilling fade-out that I leave to you the surprise to discover...

Even the artwork, unlike their previous works, is less "loud" and has a different elegance, relying more on the line of the drawing than on color, each shade flattened on a pale and autumnal ochre... Among the notes in the margin of the booklet, I want to highlight one which I consider significant for further and profound reflection on the spirit of "Pilgrim's Progress", and it is the following: "This album was recorded at Lompret, 'The Long Meadow', deep in the Calestienne, often in sub zero temperatures, between 2009 and 2010".

Unfortunately, I will always associate listening to this album with Claudia now, who comes and goes in my life, without me being able to do anything or having the slightest desire to prevent it... I close my eyes, Peter Pan R.I.P.

"Peter Pan, don't look back

They'll clip your wings and chain your back