'Sons of Shiva' are poet Sex W Johnston (who supplies the words and narration) former Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell (who supplies the music) and Chris Goulstone (additional samples and keyboards). Their eponymous debut album is, quite frankly, "out there" enough to make Julian Cope seem like a shirt-and-tie kind of guy. Imagine a hybrid of mad Captain Beaky or sane Captain Beefheart performing creepy, paganistic adult fairy stories to an amorphous, multi-ethnic backdrop of budget electronica, bleeding Frippian guitar and macabre waltz time doodling (the more ambitious instrumental passages of 'The Raven' and the 'Vladimir Chronicles' are partially recalled). Try this before lunch: "On the night I was born, an owl crushed a mouse in it's beak.... a fox stole a hen, tadpoles slithered from their jellied eggs, ants laboured in their kingdom of soil... as I forced open my mother's womb." Dessert sir? Even more chillingly, 'Bloodspell' could read as a metaphor for the Holocaust and it's decaying factories of destruction. 'Sons of Shiva' is an eminently re-playable exercise in other-worldliness. A cult album in the waiting.   Kevin Maidment