Live Music : Killer Kaya

This Santa Barbara band strikes sparks. A heady, eclectic affair unlike anything else in the modern psych-rock canon. Never content—like so many contemporaries—to merely ape the 13th Floor Elevators in yawn-inducing, period-piece Nuggets cosplay, Killer Kaya synthesizes a diverse sonic palette that draws as much from latin jazz, dub, tropicalia, prog & stoner rock as it does the late-’60s Bay Area sounds of Big Brother, Santana and Jefferson Airplane.

Killer Kaya—who have already shared bills with Shuggie Otis, The Kills, Cat Power, Teenage Fanclub, Levitation Room, Sugar Candy Mountain, Spindrift & The Strawberry Alarm Clock—further carve out their niche when the vocals enter, unveiling the hypnotically droning, operatic and instantly identifiable howl of classically trained lead singer Apoorva Chiplunkar. Her voice is an ethereal, haunting force of nature, primed to open up the sky above some ancient Andean pyramid like a shaman calling down the ghosts of ancestors thousands of generations removed, not to mention their space-suit-donning future descendents.