Review Summary: I don't know you anymore.
I feel like the last few Enter Shikari records have been an attempt to create the ‘definitive’ Enter Shikari record. Frontman and lead songwriter Rou Reynolds wrote that the band wanted 2020’s
Nothing is True & Everything is Possible to be the album you’d show to someone to introduce them to Enter Shikari. The problem with that, however, was that
Nothing is True was a mess. A complete mishmash of everything the band had tried to do for their almost twenty-year career. The album felt sloppily thrown together, a melange of new and old ideas hurled at a wall to see what stuck.
The question, when Enter Shikari announced their seventh album,
A Kiss for the Whole World, was whether it would be a refinement of the experimentation of
Nothing is True, or merely an extension. To be honest, it’s neither.
A Kiss for the Whole World is an album that seems to be carrying the combined weight of all its predecessors on its shoulders. And it doesn’t work.
A Kiss for the Whole World is intent on fitting as many genres, musical ideas and instruments into as many songs as possible. The album is a mere thirty-four minutes long but thrown at you are balls-to-the-wall heavy breakdowns, orchestral segments and jungle-inspired electronic outros, some immediately after another. Enter Shikari have always prided themselves on ‘abusing music genre’s worthless boundaries’ but this just feels as if they are trying far too hard. For instance, mid-album track Dead Wood begins with orchestration that jumps between optimism and darkness, before transitioning into an almost embarrassingly saccharine full-band outro. Penultimate track goldfish ~, three minutes and twenty seconds long, contains both the album’s heaviest riff and its most stadium-filler pop chorus. And it certainly has some competition for that accolade.
It’s clear that Enter Shikari have taken inspiration from compatriots Architects and Bring Me the Horizon on
A Kiss for the Whole World – the chorus is everything. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The choruses of the opening title track, early-album banger Leap into the Lightning and lead single (pls) set me on fire are inarguably catchy as hell. Where the album falls down, however, is what is written around these enormous choruses.
Multiple songs on
A Kiss for the Whole World have been split into two, presumably to garner more streaming revenue. Invariably, none of the second parts of these songs are necessary. The outro to Leap into the Lightning, feed yøur søul, actively detracts from what came before it: a slapdash reminder that Enter Shikari used to write music with elements of EDM. Bloodshot’s coda is slightly better, its orchestration certainly feeling more appropriate than that in the truly dreadful Dead Wood, but it still feels cobbled together – the song ends then immediately starts up again with strings. The album’s closer, Giant Pacific Octopus (i don’t know you anymore) ends, and then its second part, giant pacific octopus swirling off into infinity… meanders for another minute before fading out early. And with it goes an album that can’t help but leave a sour taste in my mouth.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was an Enter Shikari superfan. I went to every gig I could feasibly attend, I listened to
A Flash Flood of Colour and
The Mindsweep endlessly, I became an advocate for the band’s (in hindsight pretty shallow) politics, I proclaimed Rou Reynolds as the greatest lyricist the world had ever seen. I, of course, have grown up since then, but there is still a part of me that clamours to be an Enter Shikari superfan again. I
want to like their new music. I just don’t.
I wonder what eighteen-year-old YadMot would think of
A Kiss for the Whole World. There is absolutely some quality in here: the title track and Bloodshot could easily fit on the albums I loved as a teenager. But the majority of this latest effort is, in a word, forgettable. It feels as if the intangible spark that made Enter Shikari so appealing to me in the past has gone. Is that me growing up, or is that just down to how
A Kiss for the Whole World was written? I don’t think I know the answer.
