Warning: This Escalates Quickly

I was chatting to an acquaintance about his NYE plans. Turns out he does the same thing every year; goes to an old school friend’s house. There’s dinner and drinks and then, as the night wears on, the vinyl comes out and everyone contributes to a remember-this reminiscence session. The Pixies, The Clash, The Smiths, Joy Division…

I thought a lot about this after he’d gone. Would I enjoy the same sort of night? The answer came quickly. In a word, no. In three words? No, no no. There’s a reason I’ve never attended any sort of reunion ever… I just can’t get with nostalgia. I haven’t got time. Maybe if people would stop making new stuff for like a month or something?

Here’s a for instance. Two days ago I heard a remix of Enter Shikari’s 2017 track Rabble Rouser – it popped into my Spotify Release Radar – and it changed my life. I don’t consider this too much of an overstatement. I was absolutely bewitched. “I torture rock stars with pliers,” it begins. “They’re so stock it wouldn’t be a shock if I opened ‘em up to see wires.” Underneath, a relentless-uptempo-138-bpm drum-assault with layered vocal hisses and shouts plus bonus bleeps and pops. Yum.

Anyway, now I have to explore their album and Spotify’s algorithm will lead me down a rabbit-hole of similar bands. I’ll be in there for weeks. And I get at least two or three this-song-changes-everything moments a year. It's exhausting.

My capacity to be amazed is apparently limitless. This either makes me (i) a guileless knuckle-dragger so easy to impress the city-folk laugh at my wide-eyed idiocy or (ii) lucky. I wonder which it is.

​Perhaps a quick listen to Rabble Rouser will make up your mind…