Kamala Sankaram & Friends Deliver A Massive Release

An album release from Kamala Sankaram and Brian Shanklar Adler creates a world of textural soundscapes that come through as a drifting World colliding together and through it all, you get such a lush display of percussion and instrumentation along with the delivery of information in an almost haunting sense.

The Cresent album is packed with a unique approach not only to piecing soundscapes together and letting them grow in intensity and build in layers but also creating a certain kind of feeling that you get when you listen to them.

The vocal approach across this record is different almost every time you hear a new track and each one of these is uniquely its own thing so you can separate the songs from the album, but this is a record that's meant to be heard from start to finish as a whole.

The genius behind this is that the vocal approach changes per song A lot of the time. Sometimes you'll have this operatic and dream-esque vocal that floats through the ether of the songs and other times you'll have vocals that are used like an instrument themselves to create a rhythm while they harmonize and come through with color and persona.

The percussion across the record blows my mind because you have so many layers of just that at times and a lot of these songs somehow feel like they're performed live on the floor even though there's so much going on at once.

Songs could come through edgy and intense while others feel calming and have a soothing undertone to them.

This is a very strange and uniquely built piece of work that spans a lot of ground and displays such a wild and almost sporadic energy at times which helps the songs deliver those personas and those characters a little differently each time around.

There's almost always a cinematic feel and that has to do with the instruments and the vastness of it all while there is also this creative impact that the music delivers and that happens a little differently each time as well.

The vocal performance takes you away and has such an outside-the-box approach to their delivery but then, so does the music itself and everything that goes along with it.

This is most certainly a record with layers and to get a grasp of everything it should be listened to in full.

Several other artists join in the fun here and there, especially in the last track which features strings and a very haunting soundscape indeed.

This was robust, full-bodied, inventive, swirling, engulfing, and had a way of creating the type of sound you get washed away with.

All in all, it was quite beautiful and a real trip to listen to.

A lot went into this project in this record and all that attention to detail paid off.

This was a beautiful piece of work.

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