The substantial hype surrounding Enter Shikari has thus far centred less on the music, more their nearly 90,000 MySpace buddies (a good 25,000 more than Arctic Monkeys), the fact that they spurned lots of silly money offers from The Man in favour of going it alone on their own label and the general hysteria of their gigs – most notably the Astoria last November, when the St Albans quartet became only the second unsigned band ever to sell out the venue (the first being, er, The Darkness). Oh, and Dot Cotton’s a big fan, too. All good, commendably groundbreaking stuff, over which there will doubtless be many more gushing column inches, but more startling than all of this is the fact that Enter Shikari cite bleedin’ Faithless as an influence. Faithless! Lock them up immediately!
Somehow though, despite the omnipresence here of the same horrible new-age synth sounds with which Sister Bliss and her 90-year-old partner-in-Ikea-trance made their name, and despite the similarly prominent influence of an equally rancid musical genre – nu metal – their debut is an undeniably exciting record, albeit in a very adolescent, jumping around and tearing your hair out kind of way. The decision to shun the major labels was unquestionably a wise one, as fed through a marketing department and stripped of their rough edges, the likes of single ‘Anything Can Happen In The Next Half Hour’ and ‘No Sssweat’ would have ended up as insipid corporate-metal. Plus, they would never have been allowed to punctuate ‘Take To The Skies’ with five untitled, ultra-brief ‘my first drum machine’ ditties – moments as crucial to this record’s raw charm as any of the actual songs.
Truth is, to anyone over the age of 15 the actual music here is almost superfluous: now the Shikari story is really all about whether or not this most staunchly independent of bands can permeate the mainstream without the help of a major label. And regardless of what you think of them, even though they do like Faithless, you’ve got to hope they succeed.
