Bloc Party Albums (5)
What The Critics Say
Intimacy would have been a good name for Bloc Party's previous album, A Weekend in the City, which was so vulnerable and confessional that it often felt like barely edited diary entries set to music. The album's take on 21st century life and love was heavy listening in large part because it felt so personal. Bloc Party's mood is just as dark on Intimacy, which plays a lot like A Weekend in the City's mirror twin: it's a breakup album that gives personal situations a political heft. The similarities aren't really that surprising, considering that Intimacy arrived just a year and a half after A Weekend in the City and also features production work by Jacknife Lee (as well as Silent Alarm producer Paul Epworth). The album begins with two of Bloc Party's angriest, most experimental songs, which revisit the beat-heavy territory of A Weekend in the City's "Prayer" with even more charged results. "Ares" is a modern-day war chant, with seething processed guitar lines fueled by huge pummeling drums, the likes of which haven't been heard since the big beat heyday of the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy. "Mercury" is cleverly astrological, using a straight description of Mercury's retrograde conditions ("This is not the time to start a new love/This is not the time to sign a lease") as a springboard to a self-loathing rant set to wildly spiraling brass and more of those bludgeoning beats. Bloc Party push the envelope hard on both of these tracks, almost to the point of pretension, but not quite; actually, it's a little anticlimactic when they return to more familiar terrain like "Halo," which could fit in easily among Silent Alarm's angsty rockers. However, the band does find subtle ways to tweak and channel that angst: "Biko" (not the Peter Gabriel song) is dedicated to Kele Okereke's "sweetheart the melancholic," but when he sings that "you've got to toughen up," he sings it to himself as much as his lost love, and as the song closes with a swell of backing vocals, it's clear that he's singing about more than something between two people. The band captures post-breakup obsession masterfully on the frosty yet strangely hopeful "Signs," where the way Okereke sings "I could sleep forever these days/'Cause in my dreams I see you again" makes this kind of brooding almost as romantic as actually being in love. "Zephyrus" balances Intimacy's heartbreak and experimental tendencies into a standout, setting snippets of an argument to strings, choral vocals, and sputtering rhythms. "Ion Square" ends the album on a somewhat uplifting note along the lines of Silent Alarm's "So Here We Are" or A Weekend in the City's "I Still Remember," and as good as it is, it underscores the album's push-pull between familiar sounds and breaking boundaries. At times, Intimacy feels rushed and predictable, and at others, it's almost painfully ambitious. However, at its best, it balances Silent Alarm's focus with A Weekend in the City's expansiveness. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
'A Weekend in the City'
Release Date 2/5/2007
Tracks 11
Label Wichita
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
From the post-post-punk of their early EPs to Silent Alarm's sprawl of sounds and ideas, Bloc Party has never shied away from reinventing their music. They continue to evolve on A Weekend in the City, an unashamedly ambitious, emotional album that builds on where they've been before but still feels like a departure. Silent Alarm's eclecticism was one of its biggest strengths; not knowing exactly which Bloc Party you were going to get from song to song -- arty punks, unabashed romantics, or righteously angry rockers -- made for thrilling listening. They make the earnest, anthemic sound that was on the fringes of Silent Alarm the heart of A Weekend in the City, and it works remarkably well. It helps that the band's feelings are as focused as the music is. A Weekend in the City revolves around Kele Okereke's thoughts on life in 21st century London; in his eyes, it's a few highs and moments of belonging, surrounded by a lot of loneliness and disappointment -- not to mention racism, homophobia, and religious hypocrisy. On A Weekend in the City, Bloc Party is sadder, wiser, and more heart-on-sleeve than ever -- almost embarrassingly so, especially when compared to their aloof post-punk influences. The album's opening salvo, "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)," immediately signals that vulnerable is the new brash: "I am trying to be heroic in an age of modernity," Okereke whispers, backed by tremulous keyboards and guitars. Even when the song unfolds into searing rock, it stays intimate and implosive. Okereke still sings like there's no time to waste, but his songwriting is tempered by experience. He's become a striking lyricist, conveying ambivalence and yearning in remarkably direct terms. Over "Waiting for the 7:18"'s wintry pizzicato strings and glockenspiel, he sings, "If I could do it again, I'd climb more trees/I'd pick and I'd eat more wild blackberries"; on "Kreuzberg," he sums up the hollowness that follows a string of one-night stands: "What is this love? Why can I never hold it? Did it really run out in those strangers' bedrooms?" The hopeful songs at the end of the album are just as eloquent, especially "I Still Remember," which wraps a complex attraction between two schoolboys in a sweet, almost singsong melody: "Every park bench screams your name/I kept your tie." Indeed, A Weekend in the City is often more remarkable for its emotional impact than its actual music, though Jacknife Lee's lush, layered production suits the album's scope (and just happens to be very radio-friendly as well). Many of the songs follow a predictable formula of hushed verses and big choruses, and while Matt Tong's drumming adds some bite to the album's slickness, the riffs throughout A Weekend in the City are distressingly similar to each other (although "Hunting for Witches"' depiction of thoughtless paranoia makes it a standout). A few tracks explore new sonic territory; not surprisingly, they're the ones that convey druggy escapism. "On"'s luminosity blurs the line between being high on drugs or a person, while "The Prayer" distills the ritualistic feel of dancing in a packed club with its massed vocals, heavy drums, and splattered guitars; later, "Where Is Home?" uses these sounds to express mournful anger instead of elation. Bloc Party fans who responded to their dark, angular art-pop might be disappointed, at least at first, with A Weekend in the City. This album isn't as brash or immediate as the band's earlier work, but its gradual move from alienation to connection and hope is just as bold as Silent Alarm, and possibly even more resonant. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Much more polished, serious, and straight-ahead than their initial EPs suggested, Bloc Party's debut album, Silent Alarm, reveals them as a band equally informed by taut art-punk and the grand gestures and earnestness of groups like Coldplay and U2. Though they're not quite as stadium-sized expansive as either of those two bands (yet), Bloc Party sound a lot more comfortable making proclamations like "Positive Tension"'s "Something glorious is about to happen/A reckoning!" than contemporaries like Franz Ferdinand or the Futureheads would be. Silent Alarm is also more varied than Bloc Party's early work indicated it might be, spanning edgy pop, atmospheric ballads, and angular, percussive tracks that are all served well by the album's big, layered production. The great single "Banquet" and even better opening track, "Like Eating Glass," put Bloc Party's heart-on-sleeve emotions in the service of tight, energetic songwriting that makes their earnestness a little easier to swallow. The gorgeous ballads also make the most of Bloc Party's emotional directness: "Blue Light," "This Modern Love," and "So Here We Are" are some of Silent Alarm's finest moments, with a tension and impact that show how powerful even their softest songs can be. As both the band and album's names imply, Silent Alarm is an overtly political album. Bloc Party fare better than many other bands that dip into that fray, but the results are still mixed: the well-intentioned no-blood-for-oil sentiments of "Price of Gas" are heavy-handed, but "Helicopter"'s Bush-bashing and the antiwar "Pioneers" ("We promised the world we'd tame it/What were we hoping for?") are relatively subtle, and work fairly well as political pop manifestos. As dynamic as Silent Alarm is, it's not perfect: Kele Okereke's yelpy vocals get a little grating on the less melodic songs, and the second half of the album doesn't quite sustain the momentum it had at the beginning, although the bonus remixes of "Plans" by Mogwai, and "Pioneers"" by M83 help make up for this. Although it wouldn't hurt if there were more "party" (the celebratory kind, not the political one) in Silent Alarm, it's still a fine debut album with a lot of passion and polish; it's hard not to respect, if not fully embrace, the intensity and integrity of Bloc Party's music. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
