Enter Shikari - A Flash Flood Of Colour Album Reviews & Song Lyrics

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Enter Shikari "A Flash Flood Of Colour" album

- Release date : January 2012 -

A Flash Flood of Colour is the third studio album by the English post-hardcore band Enter Shikari, released internationally on January 16, 2012 through Ambush Reality in United Kingdom and Hopeless Records in North America. The record was produced by former SikTh guitarist Dan Weller throughout May and June 2011 in Karma Sound Studios in Thailand and in London, UK. It was then mixed in Vancouver by Mike Fraser.

"A Flash Flood Of Colour" album tracks and lyrics

"A Flash Flood Of Colour" album reviews

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. Take your pick. What is surprising about the music made by British rock bands during this period is how few of them find room on their lyric sheets to sing about what is happening on the streets around them. Enter Shikari should be given credit for attempting to take the temperature of our troubled times and framing this in musical form.

In many ways A Flash Flood of Colour stands as a companion piece to Punk & Poetry, the album released last year by The King Blues, the only other mainstream-breaching British rock band concerning itself with the news of the world. But whereas The King Blues are Class War, Enter Shikari are more Occupy London; not so much people who wish to smash the windows of the Supreme Court, but who desire to call time on a capitalist system draining a world made up of finite resources. When coupled with music listened to – consumed, if you like – by young people, such a narrative can lead to groans from listeners convinced that pop and politics do not mix. This is fine, but be sure that frontman Rou Reynolds’ well-rounded and forcefully articulated sentiments are more arresting than, say, contemporaries You Me At Six’s tales of boy hating girl because girl just doesn’t, like, understand him.

To accompany this roused rabble is music that remains inventive in a way that deserves more credit than its creators seem to receive. From the mad mash of Arguing With Thermometers to the more reflective Constellations, the group’s melding together of dance music, metal riffs, punk energy and vocals that sound English rather than Californian make A Flash Flood of Colour not only a compelling effort, but an appropriately named one to boot.

*** by Ian Winwood, BBC Music ***

Can Enter Shikari 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 ‘Take To The Skies’ 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, ‘Common Dreads’, they retreated into burly grandstanding and Pendulum-like racket. It was a deeply annoying record, but also one that established Enter Shikari as one of the few bands in Britain really trying. And, working outside the system, alongside Katy B and Magnetic Man, they’re one of just three genuine crossover successes from the UK bass music underground.

All of that surface tension lands Enter Shikari in a pretty powerful position for their third – and, as the title promises fabulously, they respond to the challenge in explosive style to deliver something like their defining statement.

‘A Flash Flood Of Colour’ is angrier than they’ve got before, but also prettier, opening with Roughton Reynolds delivering a nursery-rhyme diatribe on ‘System’, likening the end-times of advanced global capitalism to negligent coastal engineers failing to protect a pretty house on a cliff. Dour times, so the St Albans tykes respond by setting their phasers firmly to ‘POP’. So while ‘Sssnakepit’ might push their guitar-dubstep to gnarlier places than before, it does so with a spectacular chorus bolted on. ‘Arguing With Thermometers’ is familiar, but opens up into the rousing march of ‘Stalemate’. ‘Warm Smiles Do Not Make You Welcome Here’ sees their hardcore-dub-rave mash-up flirt with stadium rock. From start to end, it’s an exhilarating ride.

With such a sonic barrage and so much shouting, the strokes end up needing to be pretty broad. And as wordy as most of this is (‘Gandhi Mate, Gandhi’ is quite spectacular in its ranting), the message is little more developed than ‘Bankers are bad, wars are worse and the two are probably not unrelated when you think about it’. “Back to the drawing-board boys/Accept nothing more than complete reversal!” squeals Roughton, like a frustrated ram, but hey, “I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist” was hardly Gramsci either, was it?

It’s only at the end, with ‘Constellations’ and the equally revelatory prospect of an Enter Shikari ballad that they employ the get-out, and hold their hands up. Among the (actually quite gorgeous) twinkling and twirling, Roughton declares (actually quite prettily) that “I am lost, so lost”. It’s not quite ‘screw everything, let’s party’, but it is an admission, after so much gonzoid hubris, that the solutions might not be found down the disco, but at least the conversation can begin.

And it is there, in the uncomfortable reality of no easy, shouty answers, that we leave Rou, our bitchfinder general, drowning in those flash floods of colour and gazing up at the stars. It might look like a tragedy, but like the story of Pandora’s box, this fearsome record still concludes with hope.

*** by Dan Martin, NME ***

"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. Indeed, the ranting diatribe which kick-starts the unsettling techno of "Gandhi, Mate, Gandhi," could be mistaken for some kind of Occupy London protest speech, while the likes of "Meltdown," which compares Britain's economic situation to an eroded cliff-top house, is indicative of Reynolds' fondness for heavy-handed metaphors. This rebellious stance rarely transcends "Beginners Guide to Politics" territory, but then considering it's accompanied by such a hyperactive Wall of Sound, it's perhaps unsurprising that there's little room for subtlety. Produced by former Sikth guitarist Dan Weller, the album hardly sits still for one minute, lurching from demonic metal to industrial dubstep ("Arguing with Thermometers") from trippy electronica to blistering air guitar prog ("Warm Smiles Do Not Make You Welcome Here") and from wobble-heavy drum'n'bass to rabble-rousing punk ("Sssnakepit") in an appropriately blatant disregard for convention. The footstomping acoustics of "Stalemate" and the twinkling post-rock of closer "Constellations" provide a brief respite from all the madness, while there are flashes of humor ("Yabba dabba do one son," in-studio banter, a random Louis Armstrong impression) scattered throughout which suggest they don't always take themselves so seriously. But for the most part, A Flash Flood of Colour revels in a unique, organized chaos, and while it's a demanding and often exhausting listen, it's a call to arms which the flagging U.K. guitar band scene could do with more of.

*** by Jon O'Brien, All Music Guide ***