SHAKTI – Svtlo je mrtvý

Out of Barcelona, but with the relentless weight of India’s history, Shakti’s debut is a declaration and a provocation. This is punk refracted through childhood memories of Bollywood soundtracks on corner-store TVs, mafia dons scheming on-screen, the rich exploiting the poor – a nostalgia for the times when class consciousness still pulsed through India’s popular culture. There are echoes of Hindustani classical, 80’s Indian disco and garage, but ultimately this is a punk record that molds itself and takes space between expansive post punk and the rowdy tongue-in-cheek hardcore of bands like the Electric Deads or Tozibabe. Shakti’s wall of noise is full of contradictions. There’s gorgeous, deeply danceable bass lines and earworm guitars dueling against Crass-records-like snares and harsh vocals delivered in Marathi – sometimes as whispered curses, sometimes screams and manic laughter, lurching from song to song with a touch of mischievous glee. There’s a playfulness at the core of this record, a sarcasm built into lyrics about idiots coopting slogans like Inquilab Zindabad (“Long live the revolution”), or requests for the British to bring back the Koh-i-noor not to India as a whole but to “me”, personally, because sometimes punks are just broke like that. There’s film transitions that set time and place, holding within themselves inside jokes understood by 1.3 billion people, and a grooviness that builds towards dance before suddenly collapsing on itself to bite back. And yet Shakti is most powerful at its most furious, when carrying the specific weight of immigrant rage shaped by that oppressively quotidian question – “Where are you really from?”. This is a record built on the collision of nostalgia, exile, and revolution. It’s danceable and sarcastic, yet also deadly serious. By the time the record’s jewel, Purvichi Adchan, comes around with its danceable mantra of “Shakti!”, it hits as a rallying cry, a sign that within the zeitgeist’s emptiness, there is a glimmer and a drive, not rooted quite in hope, but in a certain kind of power.