CD Review: Bloc Party Stretch During "A Weekend In The City "

The second album curse has felled bands both big (The Killers) and small (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) in recent months. The short attention span and indie band hype created by the music blogger community only add to the pressure of the big follow-up. It is a relief, then, to report that Bloc Party emerge relatively unscathed on A Weekend In The City, their follow-up to 2005's wonderful Silent Alarm. A wider (and louder) sonic palate and reach has emerged from the band, as they attempt to grow yet retain what we enjoyed about them to begin with.

A Weekend In The City is certainly ambitious, as it attempts with mixed success to focus on the lives of young and seemingly affluent Londoners to tell stories of long work hours, missed connections, casual drink and drug use, and yearning for meaning. It seems wise for Bloc Party to draw directly on their experiences and those of friends, as they are still pretty green to attempt a concept album. Having lived most of these words, the band is mostly successful in linking the material, keeping the connections loose but apparent and turning the album into a thematic short-story collection of sorts.

What is interesting about the results are the parts that work: the music nails it, as this really feels like a London record. The songs create chaos and isolation in equal measure, with the feel of a late-night Underground platform or an Upper Street pub running through them in a really palpable way. It draws on a tradition dating from The Kinks late-60's masterworks to the cartoonishly lovable Blur albums of the mid-90's, and it's nice to see Bloc Party think about what it means to be a Londoner today. Unfortunately, the wordplay isn't up to the music's level of craft. The lyrics are often clunky, and it's best to pick out isolated phrases for the feeling of the piece rather than listening intently. For every perfectly evocative phrase ("Waiting for the 7.18...January is endless, weary-eyed and forlorn...The Northern line is the loudest,") there are twice as many that make you cringe ("I am sitting on the roof of my house, with a shotgun and a six pack of beer.")

We particularly like the way that the band doesn't shy away from the power chord. In the 2000's, most English arena rock is either hypersensitive (Coldplay), willfully obscure (Radiohead), or proggy and over-the-top (Muse). These all represent extremes that Bloc Party successfully avoid here. Instead, they crank up the volume and the thematic content without pandering and with only occasional whininess. Bloc Party is trying to be bigger and more important here, and they've gotten half of it down. With time, the rest will likely come as well.

Bloc Party will play SXSW 2007 on March 15th at a venue TBA.

[Bloc Party MySpace]
[Bloc Party Official Site]
[A Weekend In The City on eMusic]

Photo via Bloc Party's official site. Photographer uncredited.