Elegy for Extinction

 Enter Shikari are a band that my eldest son, Matt, was a massive of when he was about 16/17. My engagement with their music was mainly therefore second hand and what I heard came under the description of “the sort of noise Fathers tut very loudly when they hear it”. Most of the music was alright, loud techno and some drum and bass, the challenge for me was the vocals. When the singer tried to sing properly then it was acceptable but then someone pushed a button and he went to “shouting very loudly into the void” mode and I would ask for it to be turned off!!! 

Matt’s love of them was so strong that when in 2009 we went to the Isle of Wight on holiday, we had to find The White Lion in Arreton, as firstly, they drank there while they recorded the album “Common Dreads” at the nearby Arreton Manor and secondly the album cover used the lion on the pub sign as the design for the album cover!

Last year they released a new album, “Nothing is true & everything is possible” and for some strange reason I gave it a listen. Well, it’s a more mature album, more normal songs  better singing (virtually no shouting). I think that the emergence of Alt-J and Everything, Everything had shown them a direction of travel while remaining true to their values and roots. 

The 10th track on the album is 3’49” instrumental that can only be described as “classical” music and it’s brilliant. When interviewed by Apple Music frontman Rou Reynolds said “ This is a track about climate change. There’s always at least one track on all of our albums that tries to address it. This time around, I wanted to try and tell a story with only music. It’s an instrumental, what they call ‘program form’ in classical music, where the music itself is taking the narrative forward. Rather ambitiously, the narrative for this one is the story of life on earth, from the big bang and the birth of life, continuing to get bigger, up to the modern day and the horrific stuff that’s happened, such as losing 60 percent of [animal populations] to extinction. It’s one of the heaviest points on the album, even though it’s an orchestral piece.”

It’s also, thanks to Simon Mayo, the only Enter Shikari song ever to have been played on Scala Radio.