Bloc Party - New Kids on the ‘rock’ Bloc

Wherever you look - Bloc Party are this year’s tip to make it to the Franz Ferdinand heights. ‘Silent Alarm’ may just do that for them. It is not particularly great disc, nor it is revolutionary, but it appears to fit in with the revisionist culture today’s artists and fans appear to crave for and are digging it deep-like, man.

When some future social archaeologist attempts to compile a CD of the mid-Noughties we hope the scientist would also be informed about the period that was known as post-punk or New Wave of the late 1970s/early 1980s. Yeah, Bloc Party do subscribe to the current obsession with the era… It is not a surprise an audience which missed the original works is more than eager to hear the reworkings but what’s worrying is the reverent fidelity to the past, worthy of a madrigal society, that stifles variation, innovation and evolution.

Each new outfit picks two or three old ones and does them to a T. Bloc Party, alike the fellow bands that toured under the NME Awards Tour banner earlier this year - Kaiser Chiefs, The Futureheads and The Killers - sport their influences rather too readily. Even the vocalist can’t shake sounding like Damon Albarn in his better Blur days.

Their art-house pop with structured guitars and singer Kele Okereke’s staccato yelps does recall a bit of Gang of Four but it is few lesser bands they actually refer ence, are akin to, such as the Comsat Angels and Psychedelic Furs. The main issue this band has is that there are plenty of details, a lot of beautiful parts but the sum of them… fails to impress.

Little moments of treasure are bells on ‘Blue Light’, Adam and the Ants’ patented ‘Ah-hums’ with a Duran Duran style chorus, sinister footsteps on ‘Price of Gasoline’… There are some better influences, such as ‘Helicopter’ owning somewhat to Public Image Ltd and New Order, or ‘So Here We Are’ that echoes with My Bloody Valentine on a doze of melody.

On the whole, this band doesn’t make it an easy going for a listener… Personally, Bloc Party don’t engage us with their retarder approach that is oh-so-heard-it-all-before. And, it was better, more passionate, intense and - it bloody new back then! After all, the title may be appropriate - can’t hear it, it is too low, too municipal, too benign.

There is nothing eschatological about this album… Still, Bloc Party are contenders to leave a footnote in the rock annals. Which signs volumes o’ the times…

7/10