Enter Shikari – 'Take To The Skies' review
“Do this one more time and I’ll bite your fucking fingers off,” screams singer Roughton Reynolds after an abrupt halt at the end of No Sssweat. It comes from nowhere, is believably angry and brilliantly delivered. The outburst follows five songs and two interludes that range from junglist trance to hilarious Iron Maiden parody, and more or less everything in between. It makes for an intriguing listen.
The quality of individual tracks is massively erratic – the interludes that pepper the record’s eleven songs are excellent without exception, while the songs themselves vary from formless noisebursts to carefully constructed mini-symphonies – but one constant is the album’s restlessness, anger and excitement.
However, ‘Enter Shikari’ has a purpose. As is painfully aware with every passing day’s news, we are losing a war against an invisible enemy, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if ‘Enter Shikari’ were blaring from the Chinooks circling Baghdad, we’d have that war won. Because this is war music: energising, occasionally exhilarating and constantly truculent like its teenage authors, if it doesn’t necessarily make you want to fight someone, it is certainly motivating stuff.
8/10
