Enter Shikari Perform Seminal LP ‘Take to the Skies’ at Austin’s Grizzly Hall (SHOW REVIEW)

It can’t be said enough how much Come and Take It Productions has done with Austin’s new metal hub. Grizzly Hall, now renamed Come and Take It Live, has been booking one truly fantastic metal act after another. Last Friday night, March 31st, it played host to synthcore heroes Enter Shikari, performing the entire album that made them famous, Take to the Skies, for its ten year anniversary.

Immediately surprising was the amount of devoted fans in the crowd, rather than old heads who just remember Take to the Skies from back in the day. Through ups and downs and changing sounds, Enter Shikari has developed a loyal fanbase who are going to follow them through thick and thin. That means listening through lowlights like the Brit rockers’ truly awful 2012 record A Flash Flood of Colour, wherein they embraced dubstep more than metal just before the fad died, or slightly better efforts like last year’s The Mindsweep.

Either way, performing Take to the Skies in its entirety was a way to please everyone. Everyone knows Enter Shikari can still crush it live, regardless of what material they’re performing. The guys are truly insane on stage, with bassist Chris Batten and guitarist Rory Clewlow having no shame walking out onto the tops of their fans heads, held up by their feet while still playing their guitars, and front man Rou Reynolds regularly jumping off Marshall stacks. But a setlist of only classics is a basic way to please devoted and lapsed fans alike.

For better or worse, however, Enter Shikari wasn’t satisfied with the basic format of performing a record all the way through. Though promoted as the Take to the Skies ten year anniversary tour, the setlist still included a number of songs from Enter Shikari’s other records interspersed between Take to the Skies songs. There’s a certain brilliance to this strategy. They managed to draw out lapsed fans with the Take to the Skies gimmick, performed the entire record true to their word, but also forced the old fans to take a look at some new material in between their favorites. Since they did perform the entire album like they said they would, no harm, no foul, right?

Unfortunately, newer Enter Shikari material, even the better Mindsweep songs, can’t match up to the standard they set for themselves with songs like “Mothership” and “OK Time for Plan B” and mixing new songs in with those on a tour based on reflection on the past only served to show how inferior the other material really was. This led to several lulls during the set for older fans, but, again, there are some seriously devoted Enter Shikari fans who still knew every word to “Juggernauts” and “Redshift.”

All that aside, Enter Shikari indeed lived up to their legacy with a rousing performance of the entirety of their classic debut album, and that’s all anyone could ask them for. Love or hate their new material, they gave everyone what they wanted and they did it in their usual, manic performing style. It couldn’t have been a better way to celebrate the strange journey they’ve had as a band and the record that put them on the map.

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