Shiva the Destructor — Find the Others (2021)

Shiva the Destructor released the full-length LP “Find the Others”. It is a conceptual album that might as well be considered as a guide on escaping the Samsara or a guide to past life, no one would object to spend like the protagonist did: in the sixties, traveling and chilling out at the Woodstock.

The protagonist of the album’s narrative is actually quite a well-known figure. Of course, it`s Shiva and his biography as if he lived in the modern times. However, there is neither anything mystical, nor anything “superhuman” (except the name). It is a completely earthly story about the guy living his normal life, getting into the cycle of earthly events and feeling what we feel and what every ordinary person feels. The atmosphere of the album is a vivid and colorful one, like any of those beautiful substances one might (not only) imagine while listening to this piece. To feel the atmosphere, however, one doesn`t need to sink into any supernatural states (which, however, depends on your listening habits), for the music itself will help you with that. 

As the plotline of “Find the Others” goes (a well-known quotation of Mr Leary, by the way), Shiva goes down to the earth in the 1960’s, travels, falls in love, rocks out at the Woodstock, wearing those frayed jeans, enjoys the Summer of Love, engages in self-reflection, searches for himself, feels joy, suffers and changes like we all do throughout the life.

Despite the psychedelic atmosphere, or one would rather say in addition to it, Shiva flirts quite openly with the oriental stuff. The band`s work is imbued with oriental motifs and Hinduism: title, lyrics, instruments, artwork, philosophy. By the way, let`s say couple of words about the artwork which was created by the artist Oksana Zinkovska. The cover itself depicts four famous figures, each of whom has made an important contribution to the world culture. Let's call them the four incarnations of Shiva within his biography on this album, or the four pillars that shaped the protagonist as a personality, why not. However, the listener has to decipher these messages himself, as well as musical ones, so no spoilers here. The hints are given on the lyric cards to the album. Consider them some kind of a “guide” to deciphering the idea of the album (and the contribution made by the figure on the card), and you run no risk of getting lost. 

One of the characteristic features of the album and the band itself is the so-called “Shiva-tuning”. That’s when one guitar has a drop tuning and another one has a higher tuning (the guys call it a “ballbreaking kobza”). This allows to incarnate the range of quite different ideas and convey quite a range of moods, attitudes and sounds, where ethereal is combined with swamp and dense.

A couple of words to be said about swampiness and denseness, by the way. As Rodion Tsikra has told about one of the tracks (which is “Hydronaut”), it is recorded with the help of “kitchen hood” method. The dense and swampy riff itself that has been born in the guitarist`s head back in 2016 and was recorded with the looper at that time with the melody derivatives coming later.

“The method is that I record the main riff using a looper, leave it in the living room to play the loop, go to the kitchen, turn on the range hood fan at a speed at which I can barely hear the riff, and wash the dishes. After these five to ten minutes, melodies "derivative" of the main riff start playing in my head. The next step is <…> to quickly turn off the looper and take the guitar just in time to figure out everything still playing in my head.” 

Don`t let yourself be misguided by the idea that “Shaivites” can ever run out of ideas. For example, for one of their tracks they used dutar (intro in “Ishtar”). Dutar is a two-string instrument, known and used in the Middle East and Central Asia. That instrument is played by bakhshi. The track “Ishtar’ sounds as if Ravi Shankar jammed or recorded an album with Jim Morrison and The Beatles. According to the plotline of the album, this track tells the story of how Shiva met Ishtar (the goddess of the Akkadians). And don`t let various mythologies and spatial-temporal jumps upset you (Shiva appearing on the earth in the sixties, and then getting to Woodstock from Varanasi (“Benares”) right away). Well, Ravi Shankar met with Jim Morrison and the Beatles, for Christ`s sake…

The debut EP of Shiva the Destructor named “Supreme Light” was released five years ago. The band`s lineup has changed. Now the Kyiv quartet is: Andrii Priymak (guitar, vocals), Rodion Tsikra (guitar, vocals), Andrii Sernyak (bass, backing vocals), Kostyantin Kalachikov (drums). However, the band's previous drummer, Marco Sharyi, is the author of the drum parts as well as of the album lyrics. Along with the formal changes, there are also changes on the inside. It seems that with this record the guys show us that they, like a tree with strong roots, tend to grow in depth, evolving within the chosen field, combining Western psychedelia with the oriental themes, expand their own boundaries. This tells us about their creative maturity, which the guys, of course, cannot but be uncongratulated upon.

Shiva the Destructor in social media:

https://www.facebook.com/shivathedestructor
https://soundcloud.com/shiva-the-destructor/
https://shivathedestructor.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/shivathedestructor
https://shivathedestructor.com/