Kula Shaker - K

8.5 - England - 1996

Comedy albums can always be a bit tricky.  More often than not the jokes override the tunes -- see Neil's Heavy Concept Album or Luther Wright & The Wrongs Rebuild The Wall for examples.  Kula Shaker's debut, K, on the other hand is a pitch-perfect satire of neo-psychedelic hippie excess that is both a good album and a hilarious send-up of the genre.

Fronted by Crispian Mills - a terrific rock pseudonym in the tradition of David St. Hubbins and Vim Fuego - Kula Shaker were accused by those not in the know of being a bunch of coddled bougie toffs fed to the gills with ersatz Orientalism and wonky psych mysticism.

The opening track, Hey Dude, starts things off with an arresting bass groove that wouldn't be out of place on a straight album, but the parodic hand is clearly tipped with such ridiculous lines as "Don't you try and talk to me, I'm a spaceman sitting in the sky" in "Smart Dogs" and "Will I ever see the pleasure that will never end / Hidden in the misty forest that desire send" in the improbably titled "Temple Of Everlasting Light". 

But the punchline is found in the two-fer “Grateful When You’re Dead / Jerry Was There”, the inexplicable single wherein, after declaring in full Donovanian pseudo-earnestness that “Jerry was there / You could feel his presence everywhere”, Mills goes on to exclaim “I seen him, man, looked me right in the face!”  Clearly, this must be parody.  It must be.

"Sleeping Jiva" is the mandatory solo-sarod track that precedes the hit single "Tattva" (keen-eared listeners will pick out the musical quotation of "Ferry 'Cross The Mersey" in that track's solo - a quotation that deconstructs the Beatles' appropriation of Indian sounds when they set their particular ferry 'cross the Ganges).

Of the remainder, “Knight On The Town” is a rather pedestrian track that clearly had more effort into the groaning pun of the title than the actual meat of the track and “303” is rather pointless.  But the good still outweighs the bad, and the record is – even in its weaker moments – quite hilarious.