PRODUCT INFORMATION PAGE Shango View and buy for $15.98 on Amazon.com

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Here are some customer reviews of Shango : With each new album comes a new sound, and this one sounds great! Much more ambient than past albums, the songs that shine on this album are: Insects, Master of the Universe, Solaris, and Song for Ancestors. Pistolero is a great opener, but sadly seems out of place. Hule Lam has a fast jungle beat that is great to put on repeat while driving. Insects is the album's first venture into ambience (and a great one at that). Aroimo is a great song, but seems lost in spot 4. Master of the Universe is classic JR (around the 4:20 mark you'll notice a great underlying beat). The 15 minute Nitrogen trip seems to last either 5 minutes, or half an hour (in fact, all of the songs can seem shorter/longer than they really are). It's great ambience, but like Aroimo, seems to be forgotten. Solaris is a great track to slow the pace down (reminds me of Landing), and you'd never know it was the longest track on the album. Song For Ancestors is a good way to end the CD; great drumbeat, and great vocals. This is a great cd, and truly worth the wait. It would be unfair to compare it to other JR albums (they're all great). With a distinctly different sound than Transmissions or Bible of Dreams, Shango sounds more jungle inspired than past works. It's a great album, and it won't be leaving my CD player for a while... If you liked Bible of Dreams, you will like this album - perhaps even more. Wildly different, it still showcases the sounds & rhythms that make Juno Reactor great. I highly recommend this album to anybody who has found themselves enjoying other Juno Reactor songs. The first idea was: "Mm, it sounds like The Delta!". Second - "Yes, but here it is that unique Juno Reactor's sound.. " I own this album just couple of days but I think it's a real diamond in my collection of psy trance. It's very positive, fulfilled with etnical rhythms and (i'm not sure) incantations. By the way, "Shango" is the name of ancient God of Thunder in Nigerian tribes of Southern Africa.. PLUR I don't know where these guys got the inspiration for this album, but they sure as hell didn't just pull this one out of their butts. Juno Reactor's fourth release evolves into something much more than their "Mortal Kombat" days--this is a concept album that follows an African-drum style theme. The only thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is the energetic "Pistolero", the first track, which is more of a hot Spanish-guitar anthem. Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic track, definitely one of my favorite Juno Reactor songs, but it just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the album. But after that initial oddity, the album runs as smooth as silk but as dark as night. The last two tracks, "Solaris" and "Song For Ancestors", seem to stray from the darkness to wrap up the album with a softer sound. It all goes into the mood they want to create. I wouldn't say it's their best album, but that's only because I'm more into their techno-tracks than the conga-insanity that this album is. This is certainly a different style than the other Juno Reactor albums, but it definitely is worth buying just for the experience. After listening to Shango several times, I have mixed feelings. Juno Reactor has as much expanded on the sonic and thematic motifs that they began to earnestly focus on in Bible of Dreams as they have left them behind. The almost too smoothly organic pulses of their last album are gone--replaced by a mix of furiously energetic and vivid rhythms as well as eeriely cold ambientish tracks. If one part of the album is a desert tribe whirling in fury around a campfire, another is the sounds of that same desert, cold, dark, and alien at night. Shango takes the tribal aspects of Bible of Dreams's sound and, instead of letting them merely color the songs and give them character, Juno Reactor lets them *become* the song. And, so far, I think with mixed results. Some of the best Juno Reactor tunes ever are on this album: Pistolero and Masters of the Universe are an amazing synthesis of the energetically dramatic 'epics' of early Juno Reactor (Feel the Universe, Labyrinth, Rotorblade, Samurai, High Energy Protons, etc) mixed with the cooly dark organic feel of Conga Fury and Children of the Night on Bible of Dreams. Song for Ancestors is a beautifully haunting piece that falls outside of traditional electronica, reminding more of Dead Can Dance than The Crystal Method or KoxBox. Both Solaris and the two segments of Nitrogen are, for the most part, slow and creepy. Not bad at all but again, I *occasionally* wonder if I'm listening to Synaesthesia or Aphex Twin rather than Juno Reactor. (Songs like Landing, Magnetic {for the faster sections of Nitrogen}, and Acid Moon? put out earlier by Juno Reactor are worth mentioning as comparison). Finally, there's Badimo (or Aroimo as Amazon.com calls it for some reason), which annoys me slightly. The song is heavy, percussive, and deep sounding, with a crazed voice chanting 'Badimo, etc' throughout it. So far, I don't feel they did enough with this song...I kept expecting something to happen. To an extent, I felt the same way with Solaris and Insects. This is likely to do with expectations of Juno Reactor (one expects some kick to their songs). But taken as purely what they are, Badimo, Insects, and Solaris are not bad all all. But these songs, like the song 'Shark' are a far cry from the style of songs off Beyond the Infinite or Transmissions. Juno Reactor is definitely evolving at composing yet I'm ambivalent as to I feel about this. If we continue to get songs like Pistolero and Masters of the Universe, and they refine their worthy but perhaps undeveloped efforts in songs like Nitrogen 1+2, I'll be with them for a long time to come. If we get more like Badimo and Shark...well, we'll see.

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