Okay. I hope, hope, hope this is one of the few times I do this, but you know how in my review of SIGNALS MIDWEST’s Latitudes and Longitudes, I said I couldn’t quite get a feeling for what distinguished each song?

A Flash Flood Of Colour by ENTER SHIKARI, I can promise you, does not suffer from that problem. There’s moments that empower me. There’s moments that inspire me. There’s also moments that straight up do not carry the energy in the song and kill the momentum.

A quick FFO, though. MANIC STREET PREACHERS meets ATARI TEENAGE RIOT. Seriously. Perhaps ENTER SHIKARI is one of the few bands to get “digital hardcore” and actually mean it, but hardcore punk is not an affectation, even if these songs don’t have a four on the floor drumbeat anywhere. Speaking of which, throughout the record, vocalist Rou Reynolds is suffused with passion, whether he’s singing or screaming his head off. Whatever his range is, he makes the most of it.

The opening to “Gandhi Mate, Gandhi” sounds like Bertrand Russell ought to get a lyric credit, while the subdued, oddly effective “Stalemate” (one of my favorite tracks) dares to put the lyric “white phosphorous falls in Palestine” over a song that wouldn’t sound half bad or out of place over the airwaves.

I simply must talk about “Pack Of Thieves,” which, at least for the first two minutes, is a thing of real beauty and instills a desire in me to pogo, so strong that I can only compare it to THE BRIEFS. It sounds nothing like THE BRIEFS, but still, it’s that powerful. It is that excellent. At least for the first two minutes.

ENTER SHIKARI’s aesthetic works sometimes and falls flat on its face in other places. Whenever the tough guy shouts, it’s burly, but it doesn’t quite pack a wallop. It just sounds second-rate. Or even worse, embarrassing. Oh, and just when SHIKARI builds up tension and speed, they careen it into synthesizer malarky. Go past the opening to “Gandhi Mate, Gandhi” and just when the tension is wound up, a moment after he screams “We’re sick of this shit!”

There’s a second of nothing, where the moment lingers in the air, in my eardrums, and I don’t know what’s coming and…

… and the beat drops back in…with some bleep, bloopity thing that cuts the momentum short and uses it up.

Worth mentioning: In that same song, the band interrupts itself, killing its momentum, its passion to remind itself that it’s precisely that kind of fiery rhetoric and violent outbursts that get change criminalized. That’s an important point. It’s good to remember and it shows agility and nuance on the part of the band for being that self-aware.

On the other hand… the band isn’t under oath for God’s sake, there’s a thing called artistic license and if that doesn’t work, then invoke the red haze of emotion! Run with it, man!

Oh well. I liked that part.

When they do color more thoroughly with motion, “System…” dear reader, puts a nasty, vicious, torchlit smirk on my face. Through the brief metaphor of a house built on the side of a cliff, which becomes the wreckage on the rocks, SHIKARI shows its cards with a sinister smile. Yes, A Flash Flood Of Colour will be political.

Okay. I have no idea whether this will play well the in UK scene where the band is from, but there’s an image in a GALLOWS video, where, just before the brawl between the GALLOWS kids and the cops, a young woman brandishes what I think is a firecracker like it’s a weapon and in her hand, for brief, flickering moment is a thing of fire and rage. That’s how “System…” feels to me.

I can only approve of the closing track “Constellations” and implore you to listen to it. Someone will refer to it as cheesy. They’re right. They are also missing the point of the song: The books, the music, the art, whatever it is that we end up creating are the guiding points for other human beings in their own lives. I don’t begrudge ENTER SHIKARI for arranging that inspiring humanistic exclamation traditionally.

But let’s not get too heavy. I hear that punk rock was a joke ever since a 2 year old was the best thing to happen to the genre since EARTH CRISIS. Where was I? Yes. I like A Flash Flood Of Colour, even if the serious caveats I have might be the major interesting part of ENTER SHIKARI’s aesthetic.

Hopeless Records