Album Review: Enter Shikari - A Kiss For The Whole World
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
St Albans’ eclectic metal crew, Enter Shikari return with their new album, A Kiss for the Whole World just in time for their headlining appearances at Slam Dunk 2023. The intervening years between the release of previous album Nothing is True & Everything is Possible and the start of lockdown with the band starting to feel alienated from their fans. It was the Download Pilot show in 2021 that reignited the flame – as well as the live music scene – refiring Enter Shikari with a rediscovered passion to create album number seven.
So, here we are, nearly two years on from that Download show and the live circuit back to full capacity, and Enter Shikari stand on the precipice of releasing A Kiss for the Whole World, an album the band assert represents their explosive reconnection with what Enter Shikari is.
The first thing that hits you about this record is the depth of the creative ideas on show. It would be sheer folly to attempt to ascribe it against a single genre of music as it’s brimming with Alternative Rock, Post-Hardcore, Urban, Electronica and much more.
The title track is there to ease you in, with its commencing fanfare and bombastic horns before dropping into a crunchy riff and heavy mid-section. Those horns can be heard hovering over the quieter moments of the track and electronic elements compete with pounding guitars.
Lead single (pls) set me on fire is a frenzy of carnival sounds and uses sharp, incisive keyboards to slice through the binding bass lines; add a progressive chorus and slabs of weighty guitar and it’s fair to say Enter Shikari haven’t lost any of their leftfield pizzazz for the art. They even manage to incorporate a string section to Dead Wood’s opening half.
The band haven’t garnered the reputation they have by playing it safe or doing things half-cocked, so it’s no surprise when Leap into the Lightning arrives with a blistering Techno beat and goes about switching itself – Jekyll and Hyde like – between the electronic and the upbeat and alternative. feed yøur søul continues with just the electronic elements, seeing that idea out to its natural conclusion.
Both Bloodshot and its Coda go all in with the Techno sound, the first ending with a full band accompaniment and the extension reproducing that music but with Dead Wood’s string section and horns.
Even when A Kiss for the Whole World goes most directly metal – as on It Hurts – it is not without its shades of danceable rhythms.
Both Jailbreak and Goldfish head off in heavy urban beats and are about as aggressive as the record gets; the former introducing a upbeat positivity while the latter opts for an R & B flavour. Both though have the spirit of Frank Turner to the Alternative moments, particularly in goldfish’s refrain of “You are the goldfish, I am the bowl.”
It’s that aquatic preoccupation that closes out A Kiss to the Whole World through the post-hardcore sound of Giant Pacific Octopus (I don’t know you anymore) and its closing chapter, giant pacific octopus swirling off into infinity, which takes the electronics of the previous song to its natural conclusion and ends with the sound of lapping water.
If Enter Shikari’s answer to their crisis of confidence and feeling alienated from their fanbase is as complex and hook-laden as this, then – and I’m no therapist – A Kiss for the Whole World shows them to be thoroughly relevant and firing on all cylinders.
