Sleepy, Tudor-framed St Albans was never supposed to produce a tech-metal behemoth like Enter Shikari, and a suburban hardcore band were never meant to create a record as imaginative and politically ferocious as 2012’s third album A Flash Flood Of Colour. Expanding their early Pendulum-style electro-rock to encompass industrial dubstep, drum’n’bass, hellpunk and acidtronica, according to the Biffy Book Of Ballsy Ballast there was only one place left for them to go. Massive Orchestra Central.
Cue The Mindsweep. If Flash Flood… was Rou Reynolds and co leading a demonic rave at an Occupy encampment, this is the whole movement storming the gates of the Royal Opera House. And, it seems, there’s no time to lose.
‘Don’t be fooled by its simplicity, there was never a broadcast made of such urgency,’ Reynolds rants like an electro-goth cross between The Streets’ Mike Skinner and Russell Brand on opener The Appeal & The Mindsweep I, riling the ‘muzzled masses that lead lives of deafening desperation’ to a ‘fight for humankind’.
And to add import to his revolutionary diatribes, sweeping strings and mournful horns adorn the gorgeous melodic passages of The One True Colour and Dear Future Historians…, the rabid class warfare of There’s A Price On Your Head and Anaesthetist, a furious attack on NHS privatisation.
Enhancing their moments of space pop elegance, gargling thrashcore, intense rave and mesmerising prog rock moodscapes, it makes for ES’s most spectacular slab of meta-metal activism yet./o:p
