There’s a delicious irony to an album called Wormslayer planting relentless earworms in the mind that tunnel through it for days on end. Listeners fond of hook-laden, grand-scale sonic storytelling will find that English rock band Kula Shaker’s eighth effort delivers mystic folk rock every bit as adventuresome as Frank Herbert’s Dune — (ear)worms included.
Wormslayer sees a band beloved for its spiritual sensitivity stitching threads of observation into a familiar tapestry: an image of worldly evil alongside glimpses of what the heart longs for most. On a planet that “weeps beneath a mantle of shadows” (per the 2006 game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess), Kula Shaker advocate for mobilizing the “poets of light”, finding…