We can usually cope with a scene revival, no matter what state its public image is in. We’ve had traditional English folk in its varying forms. Every so often the music press like to imply we’re going through a full-on prog revival, often as a warning of capes and operatic concept albums to come. Even so, what are we to make of an implied burgeoning return to hippy-ideal spiritualism? One, at that, expressed through psychotropic psychedelia based on chanted mantras, some in Sanskrit, by a collective who met at a Hare Krishna commune. That Prince Rama are based in Brooklyn and are on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label – Avey Tare and Deakin take part of the production credit – perhaps makes the buzz surrounding the trio more explicable, as the sort of electronic tribalism Shadow Temple is built round isn’t, at core, too far removed from the campfire shamanism Animal Collective exerted up to Feels.

What can you compare it to in the sphere of experimental alt-pop in 2010? Its approach is one of transcendentalism, built around heavily reverbed and looped vocals in which nothing sung appears to involve decipherable words in English. This is set against insistent drumming and synth noises that wash, surge, create and cut through the haze, often simultaneously. Take ‘Om Namo Shivaya’, a slowly building battle hymn as created by Gang Gang Dance on their Tibetan retreat which eventually calms down before unleashing a full force of Holy Fuck-style arpeggiating keyboards and prayers to holy spirits. Much as all this makes it sound like hipster jams for religious cults, there’s something eventually overwhelming about the immersive nature of it all, not quite trance-like but not afraid to wear its underlying spiritualism heavy. A better comparative lunge would be for the experimental improvised kosmiche jams coming out of German communes in the 70s, sharing idealism and running parallel with Krautrock.

It’s not the easiest of sells, then. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on, say, the portentous, if slightly Roland-sounding, synths and Wagnerian cries of ‘Lightening Fossil’, they decide to break it down into wobbly arias. Then again, anyone familiar with the current wave of percussive/drone instrumental bands (the chants here do often submerge into vocals-as-instrumentation) wouldn’t feel too far adrift here as long as they’re prepared to accept Shadow Temple has no desire to be pop, or any leftfield variant thereof. It’s far too tripped out and ambitiously enveloping, not to mention spiritually uncleansing, for such commercial considerations.