REVIEW: Enter Shikari – A Kiss For The Whole World

The continued success of a band like Enter Shikari – a group who release their own music, have found a way to keep guitar music fresh and are resolutely political, both in their music and outside it – is a cause for celebration. They have developed an idiosyncratic sound that also draws on a British tradition of genre cross-pollination.

Hopes are high every time they have a new album out. Fortunately, they have once again delivered. Although a fairly short album at only just over 33 minutes long (more on this later), it is packed full of the things that have made previous albums so engaging. Equally successful when operating with anthemic bombast mode and intimate introspection, this is a highly emotive album whose lyrics will, I’m sure, be sung back with passion by the band’s fans on next year’s arena tour.

The first two songs, ‘A Kiss for the Whole World’ and ‘Pls Set Me On Fire’ look back to their earlier material, bludgeoning hardcore guitars colliding with euphoric rave synths and producing propulsive, uptempo bangers to get the record going. They also set the record up thematically, introducing the central idea of finding hope and beauty in the chaos of the world as it is today that runs throughout the rest of the album.

Throughout the record, the band manages to combine music from the rockier end of the spectrum with its cousins from the electronic world. What’s impressive is how they manage to do this in a way that feels natural and cohesive. Nu metal, this is not. ‘Jailbreak’ combines its guitars and huge “Now I’m lying wide awake / I mastermind a jailbreak” chorus with drum and bass rhythms and sounds like it would have been right at home on their earlier album The Mindsweep. ‘Leap Into the Lightning’, meanwhile, has a glitchy, computer game soundtrack feel to it whose sonic paranoia is engagingly at odds with the positive message of the song’s lyrics.

That call for positivity and optimism (familiar to anyone who has heard an Enter Shikari record before) permeates many of the songs and this means the album does almost veer into life coach/self help territory in places. ‘It Hurts’, with its chorus of “It hurts / Every time we fall/ But your worth / Doesn’t change at all” is emblematic of this tendency. The band are saved by the infectiousness of their conviction and the quality of melodies – the words, however seemingly hackneyed, are deployed in such huge choruses, you just don’t care. They are also capable of moments of beautiful lyricism within this. ‘Leap Into the Lightning’s message about embracing chaos and finding inspiration for creativity in difficulty is beautifully summed up by its line “build your cities on the slopes of Etna”.

Musically, it’s not all full throttle bombast. The band have mastered the quiet/loud dynamic shift and deploy it to great effect across the album. The combination of isolated vulnerability and collective joy that this provides emphasises the need for community and collective action that is a semi-latent theme throughout. ‘Dead Wpod’ also ploughs a different furrow to its peers, Rou Reynolds clean vocals over unaccompanied strings offering up one of the most beautiful moments on the record.

In the interests of balance, I should say that the record does feel slightly short. Several of the tracks are odd, dubby reworkings of the songs preceding them and the album ends on a somewhat anticlimactic note. It could have done with one more standout track and a stronger finish to cement its position as one of their best records.

That said, it is still a highly accomplished work and the work of a confident band at the peak of their powers. Both a highly individual piece of art and representative of the boundary blurring, post-genre musical landscape we are in at the moment, it has much to recommend it.

Words by Will Collins