Enter Shikari

Originally posted on 30 April 2007,

Having anything to do with music means you have to spend a lot of time on MySpace. Which is difficult if you’re like me and you can’t stand browsing through millions and millions of teenagers’ personal profiles. If you can filter through the filth though, there is a world of discovery to be found.

Enter Shikari are a slightly ironic band to be the first on the page because they’re not THAT new anymore. Nevertheless. Humour me.

For a start, you can tell you’ band is getting somewhere when your myspace profile tells you that your songs have been played 29,151 times today.. and that’s just on the one web page. Even in the grand scheme of things thats an impressive figure when you think that its double the capacity of Wembley Arena.

So what is it?

In essence, it’s a mix of trance melodies, electronic samples, and hardcore rock. Whic, you have to hear to be able to understand really. It’s not something that you can easily put together in your’ head without some idea of what to expect. Formed in 2003, the band was originally a collaboration of genres to appeal to all, though it had a somewhat opposite effect for the first 3 years or so. Then in 2006, things started turning around as their’ fan base grew and their’ music progressed. By the end of the year, they were on several large festivals and had placed a couple of big national tours on their repertoire of accomplishments.

‘Sorry You’re Not A Winner’ is the song you will have most likely listened to if you’ve ever heard of this band before, being their main myspace profile song and having just made and released a video for it.

Starting with a slightly deranged trance keyboard synthesiser riff before bringing in a catchy little bass-line, the intro is quickly followed by a metal guitar riff, before again diving into the unknown with a complete stop for several hand claps. Then the song actually gets going. The band make good use of time changes throughout the verse, and carefully placed screams make for interesting but not painful listening. The melodies are nothing if not catchy, and the band really show their true colours in the breakdown midway through the song where nothing but a synthesiser and vocals lead straight into a full-on metal screaming middle-eight and discordant outro.

Sure, Enter Shikari definitely suffer from the ‘Emo’ label thrust upon so many bands these days, but it’s hard to find any Indie bands at the moment that DON’T get called Emo. The key point will be if they can break free from the stereotype by progressing their style rather than their music, because, as far as sound goes, this band definitely have something good to offer. I’d like to see them step out of their’ pigeonhole.

What are they lacking? Mass appeal. The sound is fresh, interesting, and generally something that could definitely fill a gap in the current music market, but the lyrics leave much to be desired. The structure of the vocals means that often there is a scream at the beginning of a line, meaning the second half of the line makes no sense. A scream at the end of a line however, is usually intelligible, and one can figure out the word based on what came before it.
Half of a band’s success relates to whether or not the audience can connect with the emotion conveyed in the subject of the song. If the subject of the song isn’t clearly dictated in the lyrics then the eventuality is that fans will be singing along, but not really knowing what they’re singing.

With an average of about 4,000 plays every single day since they registered on myspace alone, they’re clearly set to go somewhere, the only question that remains in my mind is, when they do get somewhere, how long will they be able to stay there for?