Album Review: A Flash Flood of Colour by Enter Shikari

Can [a]Enter Shikari[/a] ever really win? As the officially approved Most Incendiary Live Band In Britain, they immediately face a harder job than most bands in making a record that can measure up, something their debut ‘[b]Take To The Skies[/b]’ roundly failed to do.Also, in a world where it’s fashionable to bemoan the lack of bands engaging politically, most people tend to get annoyed when anyone actually does. And in their follow-up, ‘[b]Common Dreads[/b]’, they retreated into burly grandstanding and [a]Pendulum[/a]-like racket. It was a deeply annoying record, but also one that established [a]Enter Shikari[/a] as one of the few bands in Britain really trying.

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"Don't be fooled into thinking that a small group of friends cannot change the world," Rou Reynolds' emphatically cries on the anthemic, electro-rock of "Pack of Thieves. " It's a mission statement which perfectly summarizes the revolutionary intentions of St Albans' four-piece Enter Shikari on their third studio album, A Flash Flood of Colour. Ignoring the cliched boy-meets-girl themes favored by most of their emo contemporaries, its 11 tracks continue to pursue the sociopolitical approach they first explored on 2009 predecessor Common Dreads, in a venomous and often brutal manner which often recalls Rage Against the Machine at their most explosive.

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Jesus. Where do you start with A Flash Flood Of Colour? Well let's try... at the start, all the way back to Korn's Jonathan Davies and those Adidas tracksuit bottoms. Sure, there are other sign posts to Enter Shikari's sterile, witless turn here, on this the St Albans lads' third studio album ….

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You could imagine a documentary entitled Enter Shikari: A Warning From History Ignored that would make it Adam-Curtis-clear that we really should have seen this coming. The dark days of Limp Bizkit should have warned us of the powerful mutant potential that a crossbreeding of dance, rap and post-hardcore metal could have. We should have kept the emos away from dubstep.

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St Albans quartet lays out its blueprint for a new world order. Ian Winwood 2012 A look over the news headlines since Enter Shikari released their debut album, 2007’s Take to the Skies, is to see a world that seems to be in freefall. Virtual economic meltdown, the crisis in the Eurozone, ongoing Orwellian overseas conflicts, riots in England’s major cities, endless austerity programmes the end date of which stretch years into the distance.

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You only have to Google the phrase ‘best albums of 2011’ to comprehend that politics in music has marched onto the raised eyebrows of the public - complete with luminous whistles chants and placards tattooed with black marker. Oh sure, if your search strays to a website cemented in stars and stripes, you’ve got a sore throated Adele taking the top spot, soaking in a bath of copyright agreement money from the makers of Glee. But more often than not, PJ Harvey’s tenth studio album ‘Let England Shake’ has topped critics’ lists.Saying that, there are cases by which the formula (music (+) politics (x) ego’s and ill education on the subject) can equal one hell of a cringe-worthy cock up.

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