MUSIC REVIEW: ENTER SHIKARI - 'A FLASH FLOOD OF COLOUR'

Hard Beats, Political Aggression, Alt-Rock Riots & Lyrical Might

By: Jesse Livingston

January 19, 2012

(Hopeless) Enter Shikari's A Flash Flood of Colour is music designed to incite a riot in your head. It's relentlessly intense and so smartly written that it brings tears to your eyes within the first two minutes of listening. It would be easy to describe it as “political,” but that might be missing the point. It certainly takes on politics in its subject matter, but its message is essentially apolitical -- telling you to ignore the counterfeit ideologies sold to you by governments and financiers.

The album begins with a beautiful metaphor: “There was a house in a field on the side of a cliff / and the waves crashing below were just said to be a myth / so they ignored the warnings from the ships in the docks / Now the house on the cliff is the wreckage on the rocks.” This is an excellent image of the world in the Occupy Wall Street era, but the song doesn't stop there: “When I was little, I dressed up as an astronaut and explored outer space / I dressed up as a superhero and ran about the place / I dressed up as a fireman and rescued those in need / I dressed up as a doctor and cured every disease.” This is the part that really gets you, bringing back ancient memories of a time when you felt that the world could be a good and decent place.

Enter Shikari is from England, but they most likely wouldn't care whether you knew that. As frontman Roughton “Rou” Reynolds shouts in “...Meltdown,” “Fear begins to vanish when we realise / that countries are just lines / drawn in the sand with a stick.” Rou's lyrics touch brilliance so frequently that any sense of it just being a fluke is quickly destroyed. He knows exactly what he wants to say, and he's got the poetic tools to say it as effectively as possible.

The music itself is wild and frantic. It's got elements of hardcore, industrial, and electronic. In structure, it might almost be prog-rock, with rapidly fluctuating patterns that introduce new arrangements even before you've had time to get your head around the current one. It's even hilariously funny in some places, as in “Gandhi Mate, Gandhi,” when Rou works himself into such a frenzy that other voices have to intervene to calm him down, literally saying, “Calm down, mate! Remember Gandhi!”

Maybe the best way to understand it all is just to look at the photograph on the cover, which shows a man-made shape burning with foreboding light in the middle of the fog-shrouded woods. There couldn't be a better visual representation of Enter Shikari's worldview. Like Radiohead before them, they present the world as a kind of fairytale in which we are each responsible for writing our own parts. The woods are filled with unscrupulous wolves only out for themselves, ghosts and demons of apathy and fear; it's up to us to hunt them down (“Shikari” means “hunter” in multiple languages) and show them our strength and our unwillingness to compromise in the pursuit of a better life.

A Flash Flood of Colour has already hit number one on the U.K. charts. As a mad, glorious statement of purpose -- an inspiring, desperate diatribe against lethargy and stupidity — it's going to be hard to beat. This music sounds like how the world is right now: insane, chaotic, and terrifying, with just the faintest glimmer of hope for the future. It's what we're all facing: the attempt to hold on to our humanity when everything seems like a machine designed to take it away from us. Grab hold of this, and whatever you do, don't let go. Listening to this album is going to make you feel alive, and that may hurt at first, but it's worth it in the end.

Standout Tracks: “System... / ...Meltdown,” “Search Party,” “Arguing with Thermometers,” “Gandhi Mate, Gandhi,” “Pack of Thieves”

For Fans Of: At the Drive-In, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, System of a Down, Oingo Boingo