Best-Worst lyrics from A Flash Flood of Colour

Oh look, Enter Shikari have a new album, A Flash Flood of Colour. And, if we’re to believe the band, it’s currently the best selling album in the UK. According to the lead singer Rou, this is “a victory for meaningful and socially conscious music”.

Yes, you see, between their first and second albums, Enter Shikari discovered “politics” – by which I mean they watched the film “Zeitgeist” (the “Christianity is really a pagan conspiracy to cause 9/11 and force the USA to unite currencies with Canada and Mexico and form the ‘Amero’” film, a film Rou calls “single-handedly the biggest influence on all that is Enter Shikari“), and then everything went… brilliant?

Enter Shikari don’t really do subtlety, bless ’em. If they want to say that politicians are obstructive, they won’t just sing “Politicians are like walls”, they’ll sing:

I’m gonna paste you up,

Cover you in wallpaper,

And call you a wall.

That’s all you are to me, […]

You can have skirting board shoes,

And plug sockets on your knees.

I’ll hang a painting on your lip,

And hang tinsel round it at Christmas.

This is a prime example of what the people at TV Tropes would call “Metaphorgotten“. Politicians are walls, and also, you can hang Christmas decorations on them. It’s hardly “The Times They Are A-Changin'”.

And this is why they’re so brilliant. Like Time Cube or Lee Mercer (“Jeb Bush is all in my house with disease”), Enter Shikari write unfettered by reality and the result is basically surreal poetry, with a magical gift for writing about ideas that anyone could agree with – “war is bad”, “large corporations exert too much control over politics” – and phrasing them so badly that you want to disagree with them solely on principle. These are the top five best/worst lyrics on A Flash Flood of Colour:

5. Arguing With Thermometers

“You know there’s oil in the… ICE.

You know there’s oil in my… EYES.

You know there’s blood on my… HANDS.”

“Arguing with thermometers” is legitimately a good metaphor for climate change denial. Unfortunately they cock it up with lines like that. You know there’s oil in my… PIES.

4. Sssnakepit

“Yeah, yeah, we’re nice guys… UNTIL WE’RE NOT.”

NOT!

3. Ghandi Mate, Ghandi

“Yabba dabba do one son, we don’t want your rules

Who you fooling son, we’ve got all the tools”

Yabba dabba do one son, we don’t want your cultural references so hackneyed that even Rob Liefeld did it first.

Who you fooling son, you’re not Ghandi.

2. Warm Smiles Do Not Make You Welcome here

“They need to be drowned in condiments,

and left to ponder sense.”

It’s hard to find things that rhyme with “ponder sense”, true, but that’s probably a sign that you need to rewrite the line, not crow bar ketchup into a song ostensibly about making television shows less complacent.

1. Constellations

“There’s a train at 12:00, destination: disaster

It’s running on time as time runs faster

On platform two it’s destination: sustainability

It’s delayed though, it was supposed to arrive at 11:50″

By E.J. Thribb (17½).