Enter Shikari – The Mindsweep Review

January 24th, 2015

Just going to get this out there: this is probably Enter Shikari’s best album to date, or at least the strongest. It’s a culmination of the greatest parts of the a genre and sound they helped to proliferate, a mash-up of post-hardcore, electronica (electronicore), and metal. It’s also got that snark and quirkiness we’ve come to expect with the band; a juxtaposition against the sometimes overbearing political lyrics. With this combination of things, it’s easy to see the System of a Down comparisons, but here, it’s definitely more modern, more refined, and a little less heavy handed, maybe more so drawing comparisons to Linkin Park’s recent outings, especially with the spoken word rapping found in “Never Let Go Of The Microscope”.

It’s consistently good, which I can’t really say for their previous albums, although Common Dreads is pretty close for me. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s as perfect as we can get with Enter Shikari. And with tracks like “The Last Garrison”, arguably the best song they have ever produced, it sets the bar pretty high. Other stand-out tracks include “Anesthetist” and “Torn Apart”. It’s beautiful when they can combine their variety/range with the proper ingredients: instruments, synth, harsh and clean vocals and bake them into a song. There’s also some interesting lyrical and sound callbacks to Take To The Skies – gotta love that.