adminEnter Shikari – Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible (So Recordings)
The world is burning. The world is healing.
The very best in people. The very worst in people.
Global reinvigoration. Isolation.
Juxtaposition.
Enter Shikari.
Nothing Is True & Everything is Possible is the album that proves that life imitates art. Imagine spending your entire career fighting for human rights, climate change and love and compassion. But at the point the axis flips and it starts to come to fruition, you only get to see it from your front room. This is the world Rou Reynolds and co. live in.
The album title is deliberate. The wording tweak from ‘anything is possible’ to ‘everything is possible’ moves the dial tone from ‘comfort’ to ‘ominous’. It sits the lyrical content of the album firmly between dreams and possibility to treachery and danger. And it hits hard. SO hard.
The Great Unknown starts with ‘Is this a new beginning? Or are we close to the end?’, a song about anxiety that equally fits the current world state. Dreamers Hotel calls out social media outrage ‘That’s it, I’m going on a rampage. Don’t waste my time with any context’.
Modern Living details a generation blindly waiting for apocalypse, whilst Waltzing Off The Face Of The Earth flips the album title into reverse, fronts up frightening subjects such as gun crime, parents dictating curriculum, and the end of the world then ends in a frenzied, horn adorned waltz.
T.I.N.A is the obvious standout single, but then everything stops and we get Elegy For Extinction, an orchestral movement with the Prague Symphony Orchestra, Marionettes, Satellites and thē kĭñg. Without knowing it, Shikari have moved us start to finish through a career retrospective of brand new songs. Anthem after anthem, stylistically moving from Take To The Skies to The Spark. It’s nothing short of ferocious genius.
By staying true to themselves, their art and not succumbing to the temptation to write about current events, Enter Shikari have inadvertently soundtracked the 2020s pandemic in a breathtaking social commentary. A career defining masterpiece.
This is a true end of world album for the end of days.
John Burrows