Enter Shikari; 'Take to the Skies'; Ambush Reality
See, this is why you shouldn't let your children attend primary school. They might meet other music-loving lunatics, bond, and form a band, as did Rou Reynolds (vocals/electronics), Rob Rolfe (drums), and Chris Batten (bass). Well, three-quarters of a band--Rory Clewlow (guitar) joined them four years ago to top off Enter Shikari, a wonderful oddity from St. Albans, north of London. During hundreds of shows, making precocious teens even more precocious, they've honed their strange amalgam of punk, gothic, speed metal, trance, and electronica into a distinctive sound. From rave to raving, Take to the Skies is their first full-length album, self-produced over three weeks in autumn 2006.
Take any one aspect of their sound, and it might not be that interesting. But the punk shout-singing combined with soothing choir-boy melody, the layered grit-metal guitar and mesmeric synth loops, the alternating lyricism and attack mode on vocals and song writing--all that rockets our ears into an interesting realm.
The lads could take it a bit easier on the soccer-hooligan chants and the goth-screaming (though I'm sure it goes over better live). We get it, fellas, you're potentially scary blokes.
But these 17 tracks tip us off to the fact that you're also musical blokes veering toward a fun, vigorous art rock, and no matter how often you growl the f-word and scream, "Walk the plank!" I won't be convinced otherwise. And I heard that lilting ballad, "Adieu," hidden deep into your track list, you sneaky, elegiac devils. But don't worry, I won't tell anyone.
'The Darjeeling Limited: Original Soundtrack'; ABKCO Music & Records
Speaking of strange amalgams, later this month, Fox Searchlight rolls out Wes Anderson's latest film, and accompanying it comes this peculiar but refreshing swirl of 60s rock, vintage low-key psychedelia, music from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory, and classical fare. The scenario is an odyssey involving three American brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) alternately finding and losing themselves on a trip to India.
Just how the music fits in with Anderson's dizzying instinctual visions we'll have to find out. But working again with his previous collaborator, music supervisor Randall Poster, Anderson has, we learn from some advance notes, reflected the brothers' commonalities and divisions with a few lesser-known tracks from Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, by some other famously complicated brothers, Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. All but one of Anderson's films, The Life Aquatic, have included Rolling Stones songs in the score. This time it's "Play With Fire." Peter Sarstedt's trippily cosmopolitan "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" and the French chanteur Joe Dassin's "Les Champs Elysees" also make cameos, as do Beethoven (Ray apparently loved the Seventh Symphony) and Debussy.
But the main ingredient in Anderson's musical masala are short outtakes from Ray's films, some written by Ray himself. On the album, they coalesce into alluring otherness, familiar enough to be approachable, foreign enough to play into Anderson's disorientation session.
Meanwhile, here's a test for you. See if you can listen to "Typewriter Tip, Tip, Tip" from Merchant-Ivory's Bombay Talkie without dancing around your room. Seriously. Bet you can't.
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