Rousing and bursting at the seams with a flamboyance all too profound to be left to its own devices, the guitar parts in “I Am Love” are deeply seductive and make the tonal presence of Ananda Xenia Shakti and Love Power the Band hard to ignore in their new record Love Is Where You Are. This isn’t the lone piece of music that has a lot of luster on the strings, but as I see it, this is the best example of the passive pop brilliance that Love Is Where You Are consists of. It’s frills-free, and better yet, this is an EP that puts quality above everything else, even when we’re not expecting it.
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The vocal harmonies we find in every song from “Devi” to “Mahisasuramardini” are stunningly warm and always feel like a centerpiece of the music here, but I wouldn’t say that their expressiveness comes independent of the lyrics. Shakti is investing too much of herself in the narratives here for the linguistics to play second fiddle to any of the instrumental components of this EP, and her adept manipulation of the verses to fit inside of the grooves is one of the more brooding points of emphasis in the whole of Love Is Where You Are.
“Radha Grace” features a beat that is especially immersive and provocatively stylized on the instrumental end, and I think that this song in particular has an opportunity to be one of the best live pieces this group could deliver to us. The title track is similarly wispy, but all in all, I think “Radha Grace” is more demonstrative of the technique that this band doesn’t mind exploiting when it means that they’re able to tell a story that much easier. It’s a bar-setting move, and one I can’t help but endorse.
Love Is Where You Are is a spellbinding and surreal treat for the ears that doesn’t feel so drenched in postmodernity that we’re not able to find its sustainable pop core, and in a year more embracive of avant-gardism than anyone could have initially predicted it would be, Ananda Xenia Shakti and Love Power the Band are standouts for sure. Theirs isn’t the most experimental take on pop harmonies that you’re likely to hear on college radio in 2022, but let’s get one thing straight – what they’ve got in Love Is Where You Are is truly their own and doesn’t belong to a movement of any kind right now.
Chadwick Easton