NATURAL ELEMENTS

The second studio album by SHAKTI pretty much picks up where "Handful Of Beauty" left off. It is basically a refined version of that album with the same layout of fast to slow tracks, however on NATURAL ELEMENTS everything the band did very well before is played perfectly here. The stars aligned and so did the musicians becoming comfortable with their daring and cutting edge indo-raga-prog-jazz-fusion collaborations. The call and response between instruments is impeccable, the songwriting is more interesting and there are more instruments to be heard as well adding extra layers of richness to the experience.

John McLaughlin sticks to his lightning fast acoustic guitar but Zakir Hussain adds more percussion instruments to the mix, Lakshminarayana Shankar picks up viola as well as violin and Vikku Vinayakram the ghatam and kanjeera to his percussion mix. The result of all this is that the band hasn't shifted gears and headed into new directions but simply refined the sound they had already mastered into musical perfection. I find this to be a perfect album. Every song is extraordinarily well-crafted and the album goes by too fast unlike the previous one that had parts that dragged on a bit too long. A huge hit in my world.