Do you ever look up at the stars at night and wonder what the birth of the universe looked like?
At some point, silence was shattered by a Big Bang, which resulted in us floating about among billions of stars and planets. An overwhelming thought, perhaps, though not for a stargazer like Rou Reynolds, vocalist for UK genre-blenders Enter Shikari, whose fascination with cosmology inspired the band’s recent single, ‘Redshift’.
“With the song ‘Redshift’, I’ve tried to encapsulate that quite poetic situation that we’re in,” explains Reynolds. “We’re able to recognise that the universe is expanding and there are all these other billions of galaxies around us. If we had been a civilisation that evolved, say a few trillion years from now, then we wouldn’t be able to see any of these galaxies because they would have accelerated so far away from us and we wouldn’t be able to detect them because they’d be moving faster than the speed of light. So we would conclude that we’re completely alone in the universe, which is quite sad. In a way, we’re quite lucky to be alive at this point in the universe’s age, where we can actually detect other galaxies.”
Reynolds’ knowledge of cosmology is impressive. A mention of UK professor Brian Cox’s book Human Universe only adds to his desire to discuss our origins. With talk of space dominating, it’s not long until that question comes up: are we alone?
“Yeah I think that it’s very much, not just a possibility, but that there has to be [life outside Earth],” he says. “But I don’t believe that we’ve found it. I don’t believe in Roswell or anything like that. But I think that we’re going to find some forms of life at some point and they’ll be beyond our wildest imagination. They’ll probably be much too small for us to detect at the moment, or something that we haven’t thought of yet.”
Enter Shikari’s Redshift tour will see the St Albans quartet spruik the aforementioned single, along with tracks from their back catalogue and most recent album, The Mindsweep. The title refers to the “pervasive action of people in power trying to keep hold of the status quo [by] quite literally sweeping ideas out of people’s minds,” and the album fuses their amalgam of hardcore riffs and electronic beats with political rhetoric that covers a wealth of topics, from British class inequality to climate change.
“One example would be something we’ve talked about a lot over the course of our career, which is climate change,” says Reynolds, “and how oil companies and big energy companies will fund the… I don’t like calling them scientists because they’re obviously not scientists, but the ‘scientists’ that muddy the waters and promote not just scepticism but denial. And that would be one example of where a power structure is preventing a new idea or new technology, and it happens again and again within capitalism, unfortunately.”
There’s no denying that Enter Shikari are a band with an agenda: just read their lyrics for an insight into what fuels the energy behind their music. But while Reynolds is open with his opinions on both political and social issues, that doesn’t mean he wants to force those same thoughts and beliefs onto the fans.
“I’m happy however they interpret it,” he says of fans analysing his lyrics. “I’m a fairly strong believer in music as sort of a gift. We put this noise out there and people take it, and then it’s theirs and they can interpret it how they want. They can use them for what they want, whether it’s just to perk themselves up on a day when they’re not feeling great or whether it’s to inspire them to look into a particular subject.”
Like the universe we inhabit, Enter Shikari’s sound is ever expanding, with The Mindsweep weaving between an array of genres and influences. ‘Never Let Go Of The Microscope’ is dipped in UK grime, while the beginning of ‘Myopia’ is sprinkled with skittering Radiohead-isms. Elsewhere, ‘There’s a Price On Your Head’ sounds like System of A Down and The Dillinger Escape Plan trying to out-crazy one another. The band’s sound covers a lot of ground, though there are still a few styles that won’t make it onto an Enter Shikari LP any time soon.
“I think country and western is probably my most hated genre of music,” admits Reynolds. “But I usually find I have a genre of music that I don’t like, and I’ll delve into it a bit more just to make sure, and there’s usually something I like about it. But I think with country and western … everything I’ve heard I’ve detested, so that certainly wouldn’t be in it.
“I think modern R&B as well – I just can’t deal with it. That sort of singing that’s full of ostentation where they can’t just hold one note, it has to be all Beyoncé style stuff, I can’t deal with that. For me that’s just like a guitar solo, which is another thing I don’t like. I could go on and on about things I don’t like.” He laughs. “But I think needless ostentation in music, needless decoration… that pisses me off, and that happens in lots of genres.”
[Enter Shikari photo by Corinne Cumming]
The Mindsweepis out new through Hopeless, andEnter Shikari playtheMetro Theatre onWednesday September 21, with Hacktivist and Stories.
