Live Review: Enter Shikari

You know a night is going to be serious when you see someone jump from an upstairs mezzanine ten minutes into the support act. Fair enough though – In Hearts Wake are doing a solid job of inciting the mosh, capitalising on their swelling popularity on the back of debut album Divination. Plenty of that record gets aired, including Departure (Death), The Unknown (Strength) and Survival (The Chariot), with Jake Taylor's screams making the windows ache and bow. Although they lose the beat a few times, their melody-infused hardcore is airtight for the most part, however they need to lose the cringeworthy coordinated stage moves – the songs stand up on their own without the need for additional bullshit.

Zack de la Rocha is flowing over the sound system when the “Shikari” chants start in the pit, and as the lights drop and the St Albans' crew stride gingerly out onto stage and straight into the double hit of System... and ...Meltdown, the room loses its collective shit. Considering Enter Shikari haven't brought their full rig over from England, the lighting is formidable to say the least. Reds, yellows, greens and blues fly across the room like laser beams from a spaceship, a suitable setting for the industrial onslaught of older classics such as Sorry You're Not A Winner, Labyrinth and Destabilise. The latter is extended to a point where it seems like the band are going through a series of sonic hoops, the hardcore-infused techno getting super ravey before it's all brought to a brutally sprawling dub close. Rocking a straight-brimmed chav cap, sweater and shorts, frontman Rou Reynolds doesn't make for the standard intimidating frontman and it's refreshing. His bandmates are equally as unassuming, yet the energy they throw out relentlessly for 90 minutes is impossible to avoid. The middle section of the set is built around the band's newer material – Warm Smiles Do Not Make You Welcome Here leads a mass singalong, while Gandhi Mate, Gandhi lets the riffing pair of Rory Clewlow and Chris Batten get into the crowd for some casual crowd surfing. It's Stalemate though that really highlights the successful risks that the band took on their latest album, with Reynolds managing to switch between acoustic six-string and sampler without it sounding one bit jilted. Then, “led by the ominous floor tom” of drummer Rob Rolfe, Juggernauts smashes the main set to a close, the simplistic mentalist riff and keys sounding like some sort of futuristic apocalypse, before an encore of Sssnakepit and Zzzonked squeezes every bit of energy out of the room, the bludgeoning breakdown-heavy finale creating pit destruction of catastrophic proportions. Fair play lads.