Uplifting electro discombobulation
The incredibly eclectic genre-defying quartet, Enter Shikari, have just released their sixth full-length, and title-prolix, LP – Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible. It is not impossible to test the epistemological significance of the asseveration-cloaked-as-title, as it presupposes. Anyways, this English electro-thrash-post-hardcore-pop band has made a wunderkind of an album. Self-produced by vocalist Rou Reynolds, it is equally as magnanimous as it is flummoxing. With a runtime of 43 minutes in 15 songs, this just-under-three-quarters-of-an-hour manifesto on the grim state of the contemporary now will leave you dumbstruck and feeling a little bleak… along with an aftertaste of hope.
Out of the gate, there comes “THE GREAT UNKNOWN” to set up the stage for what is to transpire. It is replete with loud, grating oscillations accompanied by slightly tamed and thrashed percussion as Reynolds blares and despairs in his provisionally hapless persona. It’s such a bizarre fusion that’s hard to really pinpoint, something you have to listen to, to process yourself.
Flying deeper into the great unknown, the auditor begins “Crossing the Rubicon.” This soundscape sounds very Gospel-inspired and ushers in the pervasive nihilism that the album flourishes and is apparent, however, in crass lyrics like, “fill me out a prescription for this existential dread,” and, “I woke up into a nightmare and I’m hoping it’ll take me back to bed,” and, “can you free me from this curse?” Yet, it doesn’t dead-end there. It transcends this dreadful feeling of doom by counterstriking it with sanguine optimism through choral multi-dubbed singing along a gospel-esque chord progression.
Then enters the first of two vituperatively explicit tracks – “{ The Dreamer’s Hotel }.” The album takes a jarring turn, or rather, a descent into the realm of this trip – it gets less sparkly and more trenchant. There are these intermittent raster-rendered electronic screams as Reynolds continually blares with subversive communications like, “I’m trying to ruin all your prospects,” with all of it sounding like quick acidic disintegration put to sonic form, but while still somehow utilizing every top-40 trope from your middle school playlist.
At this point, the album is nowhere near taking a breath, in terms of experimentation. There is yet another turn (hence, the genre-confounding style), a turn into the orchestral. In track X, “Elegy for Extinction,” it sounds like the score to a forthcoming Disney blockbuster and in track XI, “Marionettes (I. The Discovery of Strings)” it starts off as a stealthy, nimble spy tune only to morph into wide, panoramic warps and fragmented vocoder lines interlaced with a babel of other ineffable noises. The presence of these anachronistic classical-compositional sequence titles may be an analog to the past, that we need a reversion to more simple times as the lyrics prove. Or, they just wanted it to be a big, imposing album.
All in all, Enter Shikari forms a pubescent nihilism through the choral refrains and weird vicissitude of at-times gospel, at-times orchestral progressions in a swirling electronic cotton-candy machine. With divisiveness and apathy rising in the world at an astronomical rate, things are looking pretty dismal. Fear not! We shall overcome. But who will be the light-bearer? Enter, Enter Shikari.
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