Bloc Party: Hymns

BLOC PARTY: HYMNS (2016)

1) The Love Within; 2) Only He Can Heal Me; 3) So Real; 4) The Good News; 5) Fortress; 6) Different Drugs; 7) Into The Earth; 8) My True Name; 9) Virtue; 10) Exes; 11) Living Lux; 12*) Eden; 13*) New Blood; 14*) Paraiso; 15*) Evening Song.

That's right, kids — Hymns. Please to remember Bloc Party, once an indie rock band with a Liverpudlian Igboid frontman venting out all the frustration that a progressive-thinking modern day British youngster with African roots could accumulate. To be honest, ten years on few people probably remember the original impact of Silent Alarm, but you just might remember at least the fact that its power was very much dependent upon a fabulous young drummer called Matt Tong. Well, this is a new Bloc Party, kids: Matt Tong is no longer in the band, and neither is bass player Gordon Moakes, and that's all right because Bloc Party are no longer a rock band — they sing hymns now. It's all about the soul now, brother. ʽOnly He Can Heal Meʼ, see? With ʽThe Love Withinʼ. ʽThe Good Newsʼ is ʽSo Realʼ, you're just one step away from learning ʽMy True Nameʼ and spending the rest of your life on ʽDifferent Drugsʼ. Instead of multiplying ʽExesʼ, you will learn to live on the ʽFortressʼ of ʽVirtueʼ, and when you finally go ʽInto The Earthʼ, this will be but a mere technical formality to accede to ʽLiving Luxʼ.

Incidentally, Kele Okereke "has denied the new material is explicitly religious" (The Guardian) — that's like saying that ʽMy Sweet Lordʼ was actually a song about a chocolate Sauron. True, not all the songs on the album are about religion: some are about fucking, but they, too, are hymns from a certain point of view. In any case, there's nothing wrong, per se, about a musician suddenly taking a strong spiritual turn — after all, Kele has been in the music business for ten years now and he is certainly entitled to a bit of ambition, and at least one long-distance call to the Transcendental Plains. The problem is, Bloc Party have never been that great a band when it comes to pure music, and ever since Intimacy showed us how really bad they can get when they mellow out (and Four showed us that not all was lost as long as they returned to a rock paradigm), the general ability of Kele Okereke to stun us with the highly charged emotional vibration of his suffering heart has been under heavy suspicion.

I have to admit that he really tries, and that Lissack has also joined this game of searching for advanced spiritual enlightenment — by experimenting with his guitar and making it sound like a synthesizer (he claims that he did not play any actual synths on the record, but that's sort of a moot point, since new band member Justin Harris, besides bass, is also credited for synths any­way). It is a novel approach, for instance, when your opening hymn begins with the request "Lord, give me grace and dancing feet", and the Lord proceeds to do just that as the song becomes a straightforward dance-pop number (once it has evolved through the "ugly synth loop that sounds like a stalling spaceship" phase of the first couple of minutes). I'm sure this is probably far from the first time that the Lord has been praised in techno terms (I just googled "techno gospel" and I already wish I didn't), but it might be the first time that a former rock band switched to techno gospel, so throw on an extra point for Brave New World Exploration.

As the music goes on, it becomes clear pretty soon that this is still a «pop» band (at least Kele still thinks largely in terms of verses and choruses), but that they have no more intentions of rocking out — and if the musical evidence is not enough to convince you, then further on down the line the man makes it verbally clear as well: "Rock and roll has got so old / Just give me neo-soul" (ʽInto The Earthʼ). This is not «neo-soul» in the sense of D'Angelo, though — the band does not enlist any jazzy brass sections, does not show signs of hip-hop merger, and there are only a few tracks that employ a (not too prominent) gospel choir. «Soul» as in «self-consciously soulful vocalization», yes, but one that is sur­rounded by music that is equally influenced by Talk Talk, Radiohead, Al Green, and Donna Summer. Admirably expe­rimental, yes, but not too memorable and, worst of all, not too breath­taking.

Yes, Kele somehow emerges endowed with an almost beautiful singing voice, but in his search for originality he seems to overstep the line. It begins with the lyrics — trying to update erotic lyricism in ʽFortressʼ, he ends up with lines like "And I'm a fool for the sight / Of all the gold between your thighs", or "Reach down and feel how strong / My love grows just for you". If he were a swaggy hip hopper, that would at least be adequate — but ʽFortressʼ is a soft-textured ballad with lilting falsetto vocals, an ode of tenderness, and even romantic pornography deserves less cheesy verbalization than this. And this inadequacy pervades the album from start to finish: every single song just takes itself way too goddamn seriously without providing enough musical justification for it.

It's hard to explain why Hymns does not work as a whole, because almost any individual song here, if liste­ned to long enough, might click on some level (the singing is decent, the arrange­ments are creative, some of the choruses begin to stick etc.; and I have come to almost love the only song on the album that actually rocks — ʽThe Good Newsʼ, with a fairly gritty-swampy steel guitar pattern in the chorus and a certain sense of irony in the title). It is precisely because the album tries to bite off more than it can chew that it fails — there may be enough faith and sincere feeling in the heart of Kele Okereke, but there's just not enough raw (or cooked) talent here to produce a record that would be the modern day equivalent of All Things Must Pass, What's Going On, Spirit Of Eden, and OK Computer all at the same time. ʽOnly He Can Heal Meʼ wants to be the most sincere song about God's love ever written, ʽMy True Nameʼ needs to be the most passionate song about devotion to a loved one ever serenaded, ʽVirtueʼ strives to be the sharpest self-flagellating confession ever put to music — well, maybe not, but all these songs are not so much pop tracks or musical experiments as they are declarations of Spirituality, and in these matters, you can have no objectivity, you can only have faith, and I have no incentive to place my faith in Kele Okereke as the one true God (or at least, one true Prophet) of 2016.

That said, I will not denigrate the album, either: I hated it upon the first listens, but it does have its moments, and despite some lyrical crimes against good taste, eventually you might come to appreciate Kele's and Lissack's hunt for Truth. At the very least, Okereke is not an exaggeratedly hateful whiner, and his vibe is a decent balance between depression and optimism. If this is a failure, it's at least an interesting one, rather than just a stupid embarrassment.

Bloc Party: Four

BLOC PARTY: FOUR (2012)

1) So He Begins To Lie; 2) 3x3; 3) Octopus; 4) Real Talk; 5) Kettling; 6) Day Four; 7) Coliseum; 8) V.A.L.I.S; 9) Team A; 10) Truth; 11) The Healing; 12) We Are Not Good People; 13*) Mean; 14*) Leaf Skeleton.

Let it not be insinuated any further that ambitious indie work horses cannot take lessons. A bloc party has to learn to compromise, and this here Bloc Party, clearly taken aback at the generally less than tepid reaction to Intimacy, wisely refuses to continue the Intimacy line unabated. With a three year break and some sunken solo projects behind them, the original four, still tight as a nutshell, finally return to make a new album called... Four. Well, actually, it isn't called anything — it just draws four electron orbits on the front cover. But since it is the fourth album by four band members, that's what everybody calls it anyway.

The good news: not only did they get rid of excessive electronics, they are also trying desperately to remember what it was that made their debut album so successful — in particular, crunchy gui­tar riffs are back, and so are the complex, precise, powerhouse drum dramas of Matthew Tong. Memories of Silent Alarm do spring out of all corners, with enough stylistic changes retained so as not to invoke «carbon copy» accusations. The bad news: Four is still a much worse album than Silent Alarm, and there is very little reason to bother oneself with any Bloc Party album that is much worse than Silent Alarm — life is too short and all.

The main problem is that, even after introducing reasonable quotas on the use of synthesizers, Okereke and friends did not completely reverse the tendency. On their first record, they were still very much within the «punk» idiom — brutal, kill-'em-all riffs coupled with targeted shotgun blasts from the drums and a singer who was, perhaps, a bit «whiney», but dangerous all the same (you don't mess with the Igbo!). Then they started drifting farther and farther into «artsy» territo­ry, where they never properly felt at home — and Four still sees them trying to woo you with upbeat intelligence rather than brute force.

Already the first track, ʽSo He Begins To Lieʼ, lets its potentially cool combo of «broken» hard rock riffage and percussion rhythms be underwhelmed by vocals excessively disguised with echo effects, murky guitar tones, and noisy «anthemic» sections. They may be trying to go for a Cure-style atmosphere, but if so, they are lazy — Robert Smith would invest extra dozens of hours and at least several additional counter-melodies in this stuff, not to mention making all them fit toge­ther; these guys just do a bunch of «outer space guitar trills» that we have already heard a million times — and hope to inspire us that way. Thanks, guys; I already have my ʽFrom The Edge Of The Deep Green Seaʼ and I am sticking to it.

At other times, they succeed in getting more of a «self» thing going on, but then you sort of don't know what it is, exactly. ʽOctopusʼ, the lead single, for instance — what is it? A power pop num­ber? Why place the «jammed PC speaker» effect in the center of attention, then? An ode to teen insanity? Why do I have to guess that by scrutinizing the lyrics, what's wrong with the atmo­sphere itself? An aggressive rocker? Why the nursery rhyme approach to the chorus? «Happi­ness», «sadness», «anger», «joy», «depression», «melancholy» — none of the standard emotional tags seem to fit, and I'm all out of non-standard ones. It is sort of a curious creation, but I get a strong feeling that it was created blindly — and that the final result is more «frustrating», or at least «confusing», than «revelatively unusual».

A couple of the numbers are real heavy rockers: ʽColiseumʼ (starts out like a dark acoustic blues number, then goes into noise-rock territory but with a metal riff at the heart) and the very last track — ʽWe Are Not Good Peopleʼ, picking up speed and pinned to a riff that seems to be a cre­ative variation on Anthrax's ʽCaught In A Moshʼ or any such-sounding tune (must be lots of 'em). They are, predictably, quite well executed, but the «artsy» bug spoils them anyway — because the production, honestly, sounds awful in both cases. With all the echoes, multi-tracking, and «felt, but not heard» electronic undertones (they're there, aren't they?), the in-yer-face brutality is undermined, and subtlety is not gained anyway.

Overall, this is a strange case: Four seems more «mature» than their preceding albums, but in this maturity, a basic sense of purpose is somehow lost. Yes, it is still the sound of four bright, de­pressed, disillusioned, disoriented young lads locked in an urban jungle, that much I get. If they want to emphasize the senselessness of their urban existence by making senseless music, I sup­pose they got every right to do so. But senseless music is being made before our eyes in virtual tons every day without any subtext to it anyway — why should we need senseless music from a supposedly «intelligent» rock band?

There are albums by brilliant artists out there that succeed in marrying the opposites. Bloc Party are simply not talented enough to make it work — too artsy to be «punk», too basic to be «art», too limp to bring your spirit to a boil, too clumsy to conjure subtle beauty, too turn-of-the-century depressed to bring their musical structure experiments to successful conclusions, too musically smart-for-their-own-good to evoke basic heartfelt reactions. They have a little bit of everything — this is not an awful album, and, like I said, at least it beats the hell out of the awful Inti­macy — but I have no desire whatsoever to write about these, ultimately very boring, songs. I do admit that this is a highly subjective situation, though, so if ever you were an admiring fan of Bloc Party, do not take my word for it: for everybody who had Silent Alarm as an A+, Four will just have to be at least a B-, or higher.

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Bloc Party: Intimacy

BLOC PARTY: INTIMACY (2008)

1) Ares; 2) Mercury; 3) Halo; 4) Biko; 5) Trojan Horse; 6) Signs; 7) One Month Off; 8) Zephyrus; 9) Talons; 10) Better Than Heaven; 11) Ion Square; 12*) Letter To My Son; 13*) Your Visits Are Getting Shorter.

With the release of the single 'Flux' in November 2007, an atrocious electronic monstrosity with auto-tuned Kele vocals (welcome to the world of Cher, brother), Bloc Party have officially swit­ched from «indie rock» to what they call «alternative dance». Fortunately, 'Flux' was more of a wild, stupid experiment than a genuine shift of direction; the follow-up album is nowhere near as disgusting. It is simply bland, and has no reason whatsoever to be listened to in an era when the entire musical output of 2008 might quantitavely match the entire musical output of several deca­des of the XXth century.

If Weekend In The City downplays the band's strengths, then Intimacy commands us to forget they ever existed in the first place. Guitars and drums are either buried under computer-electronic layers, or filtered through them, making individual playing talent unnoticeable — an exercise in humility, some might say, but perhaps «self-humiliation» would be a more precise term. Conside­ring that melody writing has never been one of Bloc Party's fortes, what need have we of this kind of plastic sound, which is not even innovative in the least degree? The retro inspiration be­hind this stuff are the likes of U2's Zooropa, but even if we manage ourselves not to despise that particular model, that sort of ideology still went out of style ages ago. Why bring it back at all?

Absolutely everything that could go wrong with this album, did go wrong. Starting with the title: Intimacy would suggest something very personal (or, at least, something very dirty), but the whole thing is just as loud, noisy, and chaotic as it used to be, with Okereke's «vision», if the word may be used at all, drowned in the sea of electronic effects, drum machines, and overall musical brawn. If you bother to drag out individual songs, tear them apart and scrutinize every de­tail, I concede that you will find lots of different «trivia» to write about. But all of them serve the same purpose: transform «generic dance» into «alternative dance» by introducing the factor of unpredictability. So, what kind of effect will they adorn Kele's voice with on the next track? Will they just introduce a synth-guitar riff or will it be backed up by an «atmospheric» sci-fi fart noise? Will Matt Tong engage in a battle with a drum machine or will he just be taking a nap? Why, how come I don't really give a damn?

All the more painful to realize that, somewhere behind all this misconstructed wall of outdated sonic shit, Kele «Pink» Oke­reke is still lurking as a sympathetic, vulnerable, lyrical kind of guy who can be quite sincerely committed to the art of tear-jerking. The first few minutes of 'Biko', a song that has nothing to do with the 'Biko' of Peter Gabriel but is instead a funebral lament for a loved one, almost Poe-style, are so powerfully delivered that the song races fast towards the beau­ty mark — only to have the cretinous drum simulations come in and remind the listener that «this is the world of machinery, a mechanical nightmare» (© Ray Davies). There is also a funny bit at the beginning of 'Zephyrus', where the engineers construe a Björk-ian psychedelic concoction out of Kele's owwws and ooohs, but that, too, will disappear in a few seconds, buried under a layer of irrelevant, boring vocal harmonies as the band goes for some sort of poor man Dead Can Dance imitation which I cannot figure anyone swallowing except those who don't know one single thing about music from the last three decades. Oh God.

It is true that these days, decent bands tend to commit artistic suicide far more swiftly than they used to, but even under contemporary conditions, Bloc Party have outshone most of their compe­tition. It does not help, either, that many of the reviews have been surprisingly positive: want it or not, apparently, this combination of banal guitar indie with even more banal electronic dance hap­pened to be considered trendy in 2008, winning the band support from Rolling Stone and proba­bly ensuring that, instead of getting their heads straight, they will want to repeat something like this in the future, wasting good CD plastic and hours of our precious time, much better spent learning the basics of string theory or something. Thumbs down to the ground.

Check "Intimacy" (CD) on Amazon
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Bloc Party: A Weekend In The City

BLOC PARTY: A WEEKEND IN THE CITY (2007)

1) Song For Clay (Disappear Here); 2) Hunting For Witches; 3) Waiting For The 7.18; 4) The Prayer; 5) Uniform; 6) On; 7) Where Is Home; 8) Kreuzberg; 9) I Still Remember; 10) Sunday; 11) SRXT.

Well, looks like they didn't want to be post-punk-rockers anyway — they wanted to be a guitar-and-keyboards dance troup! Leaping from synth to synth, as they drill into the minds of desperate listeners... excuse me. When a band is mediocre from the start, and then takes a sharp turn to Shitsville at the first crossroads it reaches, it is only natural that a reviewer may be goaded into lame paraphrasing.

Anyway, the things that made me sit up and take notice while listening to Silent Alarm, a.k.a. This Band's Saving Grace, are mostly absent on their second release. The quirky guitar interplay and Matt Tong's super-precise drum-rattling work have faded into the background, and the fore­ground is almost completely dominated by Kele Okereke's New(est) Romantic artistic vision and personal brand of urban poetry. If, for some reason, you hate that guy, do not come within ten miles of this album's radiation field.

Pretense runs very high here, as Kele and his Party openly join the new line of indie bands who have made it their purpose to try and strip their teenage audiences out of consumerist apathy: a brave, idealistic, and ultimately doomed goal, but also one theoretically capable of lighting a new flame through the same old means (Arcade Fire etc.). From the angst, spite, and self-pity of Si­lent Alarm they try to move one level up, making the message more overwhelming and univer­salist. But it all just results in having bitten off far more than they can chew.

The music hardly registers. Too many of these songs sound like they have been stolen out of Robert Smith's wastebasket — including the lead-off single, 'The Prayer', with its deep-running ambience-setting electric guitar waves, «intelligent dance» rhythms, and Kele's prophetic, ago­ni­zing screams (that still sound a tad weak and mild when you compare them to The Cure at their best). So the lyrics lambast the trendy hipster of 2007: big deal. Who ever succeeded in changing the world with such a silly thing as lyrics? Even with Bob Dylan, the exact words never mattered half as much as the setting and the way in which they were delivered.

It is not, of course, as if Silent Alarm had a ton of great guitar riffs and here they have all been replaced by same-sounding, «backgroundish», guitar-keyboards droning. To me, at least, those riffs never spoke on a personal level — but it was interesting and amusing to watch them weave the patterns around each other, in the hopes that, one day, all of it would grow into something completely different. On Weekend, allegedly expressing their dissatisfaction about sounding like all the other indie guys out there, they just threw it all away, resulting in... uh... sounding like all the other indie guys out there. What, did they really think that, by replacing complex chords with U2-ish chimy jangle and spicing it up with electronics, they could become more interesting? This I cannot possibly understand.

Granted, accidents will happen, sometimes pleasant ones. Way way near the end, a few songs af­ter complete desperation has set in, the band unexpectedly erupts into a fabulous power pop tune: 'I Still Remember' has not just the best guitar melody on the album, but one of the best guitar melodies of the decade — simple, charming, and beautifully fitting in with the rare exception of a shy, intimate lyrical piece, as Kele reminisces about a botched romance. If you like The Cure's 'Friday I'm In Love', you are almost guaranteed to like this as well. I also happen to be a big fan of 'Sunday' and its ultra-catchy 'I'll love you in the morning' chorus... somehow, it seems that love song territory is a better bet for Bloc Party than their gopherish attempts to uproot the grand oak of social inertia and indifference.

Probably because of the passion involved, A Weekend In The City is a slow grower, and those who generally prefer denser, pseudo-orchestral sounds to in-yer-face smash guitar may even come to like it over its predecessor. Yet even after a few listens, to my ears it comes out as a pain­fully wrong direction for these guys, although it took them two more years to become definitively fixed in that direction. Thumbs down, bar a special rescue mission for the two songs I mentioned.

Check "A Weekend In The City" (CD) on Amazon
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Bloc Party: Silent Alarm

BLOC PARTY: SILENT ALARM (2005)

1) Like Eating Glass; 2) Helicopter; 3) Positive Tension; 4) Banquet; 5) Blue Light; 6) She's Hearing Voices; 7) This Modern Love; 8) Pioneers; 9) Price Of Gas; 10) So Here We Are; 11) Luno; 12) Plans; 13) Compliments.

Here is another band whose recent status as «critical darlings» has pissed off so many people that, behind the endless discussions on the nature of overratedness, one almost forgets to talk about the nature of Bloc Party. Here are the bare facts. Bloc Party is an Essex-based rock band, formed from 1999 to 2003 by a bunch of college students/dropouts of highly mixed origin (lead guitarist and bass players are Brits, lead singer and rhythm player Kele Okereke is of Igbo descent, drum­mer Matt Tong is Malaysian — a melting pot paradise) and highly developed intellect. The band's first recordings provoked interest on the part of figures like Franz Ferdinand, and their first album became a smash success in the UK, making them hip-hip-hip for most of 2005, all the way up to their being blown away as the next best hip-hip-hip thing by the Arctic Monkeys next year.

It goes without saying that, these days, three guys with guitars and one guy with drums cannot become a smash success if they do not make strange new tricks with these things, or, as it more frequently turns out, if they do not give out the popular impression that they are making strange new tricks with these things. On the general scale, what they give out is a post-punk type sound, songs that are simple and complex at the same time, combining fast three-chord riffs in so many different ways that they start sounding like multi-note riffs, not to mention fluent, impressive in­terplay between the two guitarists that certainly took quite a bit of sweat to orchestrate. On the more particular scales, they occasionally bring in small bits of electronic sound that they also in­herited from their Eighties' childhood, and melodies that are fairly hard to crack. Either they do not really know how to write them, or I do not really know how to read them.

I do not want to reduce these guys to the sum of their influences, which include quite a few res­pectable outfits from around 1978 to around 1999. People have done that — successfully — and, as usual, it has led to some dismissing them as talentless copycats and others to endorsing them as bona fide inheritors. For me, the one impressive thing about this band is the playing. Even if the melodies as such usually do not work, all four of these guys sound like seasoned pros. Particular kudos goes to drummer Matt Tong, whose inventive fills and overall precision level I would im­pressionistically rate among the finest I'd heard from the 21st century; but the rest of the guys are no slouches, either — phenomenal coordination and discipline, even when it comes to relatively difficult passages. The entire album went very smooth with me for that reason alone.

The weakest spot is arguably Kele Okereke's singing. He certainly can sing, and he is expressive enough, but a voice is a voice: you can pour as much fiery spirit in your guitar playing as your body contains, but the vocal tract is a far less reliable mediator, and it always sounds like he is seriously constrained by it — wants to give out a hundred percent but only comes out with fifty, so to speak. As a result, most of the time it sounds like he's pitifully whining about life rather than apocalyptically threatening about it, and pitiful whining just doesn't sit too well with the musical moods they create. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that, as a modestly preservable piece of art, Silent Alarm might have worked better as a completely instrumental album.

Like I said, the songs aren't catchy; in fact, even as I am giving it a fourth and fifth listen, all of them are instantaneously forgettable on their own. What could you ask, after all, from an album based on generic pop-punk riffs, not a single one of which stays around for too long at that? An album whose chorus lines do not rhyme and are usually hard to separate from verse melodies? An album on which every second song plays at the exact same tempo, and almost every first song has the exact same arrangement? With the hit singles completely interchangeable with the LP-only tracks? Nothing.

What does the album aim for as a whole? Hard to say. It is clear that these guys are being serious; tired of endless cynicism and post-modern intellectualism like so many of their peers, they create this dreary grey landscape against which they stand, complaining and complaining and complai­ning about every aspect of life. Just look at this: (1) "It's so cold in this house, like drinking poison, like eating glass"; (2) "Are you hoping for a miracle? Some things will never be dif­ferent"; (3) "You're just as boring as everyone else, nothing ever happens"; (4) "Heaven's never enough, we will never be fooled"; (5) "You didn't even notice when the sky turned blue"; (6) "I'm tearing down posters, I was never ever alive"; (7) "This modern love breaks me, this modern love wastes me"; (8) "We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?"; (9) "Nothing ever comes for me, the ghosts are here, red white and blue"; (10) "I really tried to do what you wanted, it all went wrong again"; (11) "You've been lying to me, you deserve it"; (12) "Stop being so laissez-faire, we're all scared of the future"; (13) "We sit and we sigh and nothing gets done... what are we coming to, what are we gonna do?" Yep, that's all of the songs in a nutshell. Seems like there's more depression inside of Kele than in all the Igbo people combined.

I would not buy this attitude without a second thought. It is nice to think of it as a good antidote not just for MTV-type cultures, but also for the animalistic hedonism of the hipster club ones, but it does not always seem like the band is speaking with its own voice; their desire to be heard is obviously sincere, but what they say is such goddamn old news that it would have taken more than Kele Okereke's whiny delivery and the combined professionalism of his band to make it work in a new way. A decade from now, Silent Alarm will be a fascinating culturological study for those interested in the average intelligent mindset of a typical mid-noughties' youth from the EU; but in the meantime, it will be inevitably washed away by a couple dozen «no better, no wor­se» albums exploring more relevant musical trends and speaking more actual lyrical jargons.

But lingering still in my memory is the superb musicianship, for which alone thumbs up are guaran­teed. If you find a karaoke version of the record lying around, let me know.

Check "Silent Alarm" (CD) on Amazon
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