Enter Shikari's 'Nothing Is True' Is An Oddball Masterpiece Lost In A Sea of Flaws

Enter Shikari are yet another band that I’m adding to the long list of artists I’m only now getting around to in 2020. This is the first record I’m ever listening to from the band, and from what I can tell it might be a bit of a strange one to jump on with as it sees the band pushing themselves further into the electronic side of their sound. Still though, I can really see the hype behind these guys based off of this record. It’s definitely got some flaws that become more and more apparent the longer the record goes on, but there’s a lot of stuff on here that shows a lot of promise. They’ve put together a really ambitious and sprawling collection of songs with a complex transitionary flow and a lot of experimental moments here. It’s an album with a million ideas all being thrown at the wall, and fortunately enough of them stick to make it worth a listen. However, there are quite a few of those ideas that miss that wall entirely.

I was really interested by the idea of Trancecore, a genre that Enter Shikari themselves seem to have essentially created based on what I could find. I think I’m going to have to backtrack through their discography if I want to hear their take on that though, as there really isn’t any of that on this thing. Instead what we get is a Progressive and long record that bridges it’s gaps between BMTH’s Amo and full blown Electropop with ambitious Art Rock passages. It’s safe to say that there is so much going on here that it’s difficult to even keep track of, which can make this a bit of an obnoxiously hard to consume release at points. I found the album to be at it’s best when it combined all of its elements into individual songs instead of leaning heavier into certain aspects at certain points. For example, the opener The Great Unknown is a really great way to start out the album, as it puts every ingredient in the album’s recipe to good use. It’s a great example of pacing and balancing the many different sounds going on all at once.

The band also does a fantastic job at following in the footsteps of Bring Me The Horizon’s latest record, as I mentioned earlier. Tracks like { The Dreamer’s Hotel } and modern living…. do such a fantastic job at mixing Post Hardcore-lite guitar riffs with soaringly catchy choruses and Electropop production that all meshes super well. I’m one of the people that found plenty to enjoy on that last BMTH record, but even I think that these guys are doing what they aimed to do considerably better. They also do a pretty solid job at pushing their experimental boundaries with tracks like Waltzing Off the Face of the Earth (I. Crescendo), The Great Unknown and the genre-warping Pop Rock slam T.I.N.A. These tracks all warp the perception of what exactly this album is by blending together so many obtuse production techniques and songwriting ideas. In the case of the ones I mentioned, they do a great job of this whole Electro-Art Rock thing they’ve got going on. All the tracks that match these particular sounds on the album are fantastically written and infinitely replayable, for a variety of reasons.

Where everything falters substantially is when the band leans too heavily into their electronic side and pumps the record full of useless interludes that break up the pacing. I’m fine with the electronic heavy style we got on Crossing the Rubicon because they didn’t sacrifice the pop sensibilities of their songwriting technique in favor of mindless wubs. However, the six minute stretch that’s made up of the two Marionettes tracks is easily the weakest spot on the album. It doesn’t help that there’s a pointless four minute interlude in the form of Elegy For Extinction that comes in right beforehand too. I’m not even the kind of guy who hates Dubstep just for being Dubstep, but those Marionettes tracks just feel way too out of place on the record. The second act of the two-part song is definitely much better than the first as there are some nice melodies wrapped up in there, but they are lost in a sea of over-compressed garbage. It’s poorly produced Electronic music that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the record. Besides, an entire 10 minutes of time passes in the form of this trilogy of useless tracks, which makes up just under a quarter of the entire album right there alone.

I don’t know why they made that awful chunk of the record so long and limited alcoholics anonymous (main theme in b minor) and the pressure’s on. to only taking up four minutes. Both of these tracks make so much better use of the Electronic influences going on throughout the record, but their ideas aren’t capitalized enough within the short runtime of the two tracks combined. There’s just such a massive, gaping hole taking up a whole fourth of the album that just leaves me scratching my head as to why they didn’t extend these much better sounding ideas if they had to had full blown Electronic tracks. That actually brings me to another larger issue that kills the album a bit - portioning. They commit way too much time to the wrong things on here. There are 9 minutes worth of interludes if you include the closing track Waltzing Off the Face of the Earth (II. Piangevole). On top of that, those interludes are very poorly placed. Standout track T.I.N.A. is surrounded by two interludes, the second of which beginning that horrible trilogy of songs I mentioned earlier. The interludes are so poorly placed that they make good songs harder to listen to in context of the album because the tracklisting is just so messy.

I actually did the math, and 34% of the album’s runtime is taken up entirely by poorly placed interludes and those two Marionettes tracks alone. That means we only get around 2/3 of the kind of music that is the reason anybody is listening to this album. As a complete listening experience I’m sure you can imagine how that math makes for an inconsistent time. Thankfully though, the highlights still make this very much worth listening to at least once. I went back and listened to that good two-thirds of the album without all the fluff, and what I got was a fantastically great album that I would have likely given a 9/10. I really do appreciate the ambition behind the issues on the album too though, I really do. Part of me is happy that they took those risks and wound up shooting themselves in the foot as opposed to not taking any risks at all. After all, when they combine those risks with more grounded and structured songs on this album they get some electrifying results. Enter Shikari’s sixth studio album Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible is home to some fantastically invigorating music that combines Pop Rock, Electropop and Post-Hardcore to great effect. However, it’s greatly weighed down by some out of place interludes, pacing issues and costly musical missteps in the form of extremely compressed and headache-inducing Dubstep cuts. Still very much worth a spin though, as the highlights are nothing short of incredible. - 6.6/10 (Best Songs - modern living…., T.I.N.A., satellites* *)