holy shit

Once upon a time, Shelter was a pain-in-the-ass Krishna hard-core band. Whether playing anti-melodic, Pantera-like thrash punk or selling beads at the airport - they were always ranting about the sins of humanity.

Especially if you were anything resembling a real live Hindu.

How unfortunate for me.

Being the only speck of brown sugar at a DC warehouse show about five years ago, I was mercilessly harangued by a bunch of born-again Krishnas, straightedge kids trying to "do the 'du" - Hindu, that is.

Lead singer Ray Cappo sauntered over to me, pointed at my green mohawk and proclaimed, "Look at what America has done to you."

I didn't know whether to cry or beat him up. As he quoted catch phrases from the Bhagawat Geeta, the only thing I could interject was, "Look pal, I was born here."

The band was then living in a Hare Krishna temple in Mount Airy. I told him I was coming to Philadelphia and he invited me to live at the temple. No thanks. Even Penn's campus was a better alternative.

Five years later, with a new album, Beyond Planet Earth (Roadrunner), Cappo talks to me from his Brooklyn apartment.

The 31-year-old Krishna punk hasn't lost his snide skater-boy edge. Sprinkling his dialogue with likes and ya knows, it is like listening to Bill and Ted's Spiritual Adventures.

He rattles on about his plan to launch a brand of cruelty-free sneakers. He speaks about the state of India and his travels there. We start talking about music and Cappo tells me he likes Fiona Apple, Beemsheem Joshi (an Indian bhajan singer), Stevie Wonder and the Spice Girls (who he says "are good for all the girls that aren't Pamela Anderson - it inspires them to put on makeup and feel pretty"). On his worst music list are Cheap Trick (bad move, Ray?), Aerosmith and Cyndi Lauper. Then I get on the topic of Christian rock bands, which he says he "wasn't into at all." What makes his god rock any different? I ask. "I dunno, maybe I am the Krishna version of Stryper," he replies cockily.

So how has the rock god changed in five years?

"At one time I was more of a preacher. Now I sort of, like, practice. What I tried to do with the whole Eastern philosophy aspect of my life is work it in [to my music] in ways that people who aren't into religion or god or anything can identify. That's one thing about Eastern thought as opposed to a lot of Western concepts of religion: [Easterners] don't divorce spirituality from life itself. For example cooking - in the East, cooking is a meditation."

Funny, I never heard my grandmother chanting the name of Bhagwan as she cooked up curried chicken.

Cappo's blanket-statement exoticism leads me to ask if he had been introduced to the culture through '60s hippie psychedelia.

"I didn't walk in the door after Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young or something," quips Cappo.

So how did the hard-core singer find his way into the nonviolent world of Krishna?

"Tragically, my father went into a coma and stayed that way for three years. No one quite knew what happened - all I know is that he was caught in this life/death limbo, and it really made me start contemplating how frail life is, and how it can end in a moment. So I quit my band at the time, which was called Youth of Today, and I just split for India."

Right about here, I start to feel like an asshole. And with his forgiving outlook, Cappo just keeps on making me feel like one.

"I think when anybody does anything bold, they're gonna get flack. I'm just reading a book by Martin Luther King. King was bold, he got flack. You get it even if it's not a good kind of bold. Mussolini gets slammed. Jesus Christ gets, you know, killed. Anybody who speaks out, they get shit from people. That's just the way it is. I think that if you are gonna speak out, you just have to make sure that what you're speaking out about is something that's gonna help mankind instead of destroy it."

But I guess God wasn't watching too closely when the band's van went off the side of a 175-foot cliff - an incident Cappo claims was foreseen by Indian and Brazilian fortune tellers.

"I definitely looked at [the accident] in a different way because of [my beliefs]. I think that being into spirituality, when something tragic happens, you try to draw out some good from it - otherwise, when there are bad things they are bad, when there are good things they're good."

And now, by the grace of Krishna, Shelter's getting ready to tour again to support their new album.

Listening to Beyond Planet Earth before the interview, I cursed as each track got better and better. At first sounding like Green Day, then transcending into Dag Nasty, Shelter's sound is now emo-core glory.

As much as I initially wanted this record to suck, it doesn't. It's melodic, less preachy and more accessible. What's especially cool is to see the band dabbling in different styles: for example, their foray into ska, "Alone On My Birthday," or the Weezer-like "I Know So Little (So Well)."

I ask Cappo what he does with his profits and he tells me that he gives most of it away to charity.

"I find that if you give away, you always get back somehow."

He asks me how I heard about Shelter, and I tell him about the DC gig, not naming the source of the wankerly comment that pissed me off so.

"Man, I'm sorry that happened to you at one of our shows? See? That's why..."

I interrupt and remind him who said it. An uncomfortable pause ensued, followed by a five-year-old apology.

"Don't worry about it," I say. "But you know, like Hinduism, it's all cyclical. Everything comes back to you eventually."

- Geeta Dalal