“This is the kind of song that would make your dad tell you that music was better in his day,” Enter Shikari’s spiky-haired frontman Rou Reynolds said before one of the St Albans quartet’s newer compositions, The Revolt of the Atoms. He could have been talking about their entire oeuvre.
Maybe there is a Dylan influence hidden in their schizophrenic mix somewhere. Theirs is music for the indecisive, those torn between rocking and raving who’d prefer to ingest every musical genre at 100mph. Rabble Rouser was a tense grime track. Step Up saw Rob Rolfe attacking his drumkit as though he might swallow it whole. “We understand we’re not the easiest band to get into,” said Reynolds during another rare pause. “Thank you for putting in the time.”
Across five albums in a decade, all these ideas aren’t running short. A few songs from their most recent album, 2017’s The Spark, favoured instant catchiness over knotty style-hopping, especially Live Outside and The Sights.
This career-spanning show made room for stranger fare, however, notably the ranting dubstep metal of Gandhi Mate, Gandhi. They’re not for everyone — especially not your dad — but for sheer visceral thrills they’re hard to beat.
