Of course, Cologne is not London and the southern bridge is not the Wembley Arena, but that today you have to think about the other in one place is not a coincidence. Only last week, Enter Shikari proudly published her concert recording “Wembley. London. 17th February 2024”, the largest headliner concert so far from her career, which has now lasted 20 years. And today they play the largest headliner concert on the southern bridge Open Air railings that they have ever played in Germany. London is not Cologne, but at least you can say that things are going extremely well for the genre bastard band from St. Albans. Not only in Germany or in the UK, but all over the world.
So now a Friday evening in the cathedral city, the weather, as it couldn’t be better, 28 degrees, blue sky, mandatory over-Köln-Lacht-SowiSo-die sunshine and on the Rhine there is the very best party mood. Many young people with very colorful hairstyles have gathered, the concert is sold out. With Blackout Problems from Munich and the Post-Hardcore veteran La Dispute from Michigan, Enter Shikari have two supporters in their luggage, so there is a festival feeling on the alternative-based terrain.
And even if the preconditions could not be better and you also know what this band is able to offer, you remain amazed at what is about the first synthetic sounds of the opener “Bloodshot”, which are torn until late by the cutting guitars, since it takes place in Cologne. The perfect interlocking of electronic melodies and output hardcore riffs, the organic merging of 4000 individuals into a large, wild organism, but above all, this perfect rock’n’roll escalation, which is already out of control in the first seconds. It’s all so big, so vehemently, so logical that it is amazing.
An Enter Hikari concert is the moshpit
Anyone who has ever been to an Enter Hikari concert knows that there are a few laws in these places, such as this: Law number 1. At an Enter Hikari concert, there is no escape before the Mosh Pit, because an Enter Hikari concert is the moshpit. In Cologne, too, jumping and dancing into the last rows, and front man Rou Reynolds also specifies the solution for the further evening after the opener. He roars the next hour and a half into his microphone, it is about energy.
Energy is probably the largest, perhaps also the only common denominator that this evening, yes, steep thesis, even has this band. Enter Shikari plays through a set that uses songs from all of her seven studio albums, and it is completely impossible to make an attempt to label it.
The evening is a mixture of sticky-sweet sugar sewing fair techno (“mothership”), hard rock music (“Dreamers Hotel”), punk (“Sssnakepit”), Hymnic declarations of love (“satellites * *”) and political departure (“Arguing with thermometers”). Reynolds screams, sings, raps, he dances, he summarizes, he hypnotizes, he mixes his songs with spoken word poetics and repeatedly questions all the certainties in which he sometimes deconstructs his songs until the uncertainty. In Cologne, however, the songs remain essentially, there are other concerts where it mutilates them more.
That is probably also the secret of success of the trancecore veterans, which is what makes Enter Shikari the band of the hour. Her refusal to come close to a drawer in which you could categorize it is a perfect comment on the zeitgeist, even more on a young generation that has long since got rid of all pop cultural labels. The taste of their music is a forever long Spotify playlist in which the panorama of all possibilities is reflected, completely free of distinction and etiquette. And that is exactly Enter Shikari. A band that mixes up everything that she enjoys. A big, wild bastard who just wants to escalate.
In the meantime, you are therefore no longer sure whether you are at a punk concert or a rave, but it doesn’t matter if, for example, the concise “Juggenauts” synthies are recorded in the air. The energy that manifests itself that evening is almost tangible.
Revolution and endorphins are in the air
In addition, there is the revolutionary gesture, which can also be found in the lyrics of the setlist played in Cologne. Reynolds dreams and sings of an anti -capitalist world that is organized in such a way that it causes the best in humans that he wants to find the sweet spot in his music, he once said between escapism and political awakening. The fact that these political ideas are childlike-naive hippie dreams only make the evening better, because Utopien invite dreamer to and in addition to a well-laid out band, the audience in Cologne is the biggest gift.
The wildest safe space that you can only imagine
You have to imagine the crowd like a single madness, like a completely out of control party, full of people who don’t know each other, but somehow everyone loves very much. Everyone takes care of everyone, a woman uses a crowdsurfing man as a human surfboard. An Enter Shikari concert, this is law number 2, is the wildest safe space that you can only imagine. And the madness of the musical genre cacophony is the putty between the audience and the band.
When the band ends the show with the completely serious “A Kiss for the Whole World”, a huge collective organism again becomes a variety of individuals who go out into the night into every cell of their body and have the feeling that the world may be a very good place. This must be this energy that Reynolds conjured up at the beginning of the show. Cologne may not be London, but when it comes to excess, the Rhinelander can keep up quite well.