Um.
In the grand tradition of the tabloids - oops, I mean The Guardian, of course - I thought I'd open the field to my readers to have their own say in this increasingly popular series. I'll have the first go, get the ball rolling. (Many thanks to Tom Tigertrap for the Bloc Party suggestion.)
1) They're astonishingly mediocre. Their Wikipedia entry states that Bloc Party's brand of spiky guitar rock draws on influences such as The Cure, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Blur and The Smiths. No, wait! Wikipedia has it that their style has been compared to and inspired by such bands as Radiohead, U2, Depeche Mode, and Björk. Or is it...Talking Heads, Kate Bush, Björk, Kraftwerk, David Bowie, and Dizzee Rascal?The band have also admitted to fondnesses for Mogwai and Huggy Bear. A truly eclectic bunch - one hopes.
And yet 'Talons' sounds like Tin Machine-era Bowie - homogenised and codified for the Billy Corgan generation - fluttery and fidgety and full of those irritating 'breathy' vocals that are bad enough when Pussycat Dolls do them, with vague nods in the direction of 'nu metal'. The Robert Smith comparison is fairly smart if you remember that The Cure crammed every idea they possessed into their first two singles - and 'Talons' sounds like mid-80s Cure. It's like The Prodigy, without any energy whatsoever.
They're sensitive, like a three-year-old veruca.
OK, your turn...
I gave them a chance, I got all their albums. I must say, I got rid of them as fast as I could. The big english band of the moment is definitely Kasabian.
ReplyDeleteI bought their first two albums. While listening to the second one, I remember thinking "This sounds just like Bloc Party, but not as good" which was what I thought about half the bands I heard on XFM/6Music and also testament to their dearth of ideas.
ReplyDeleteBloc Party embody pretty much everything that's wrong with so-called mainstream indie: the fact that they so overtly model their career path and musical 'evolution' on Radiohead; that their production is lent far more importance than the songs; their absolute and total lack of any sense of humour; the cold, soul-deprived, over-polished nature of their 'art'... that they appear to value these character traits as ASSETS.
ReplyDeleteI saw them play at the Barfly before their debut album was released. I didn't like their pompous, melodramatic, woe-is-me indie cabaret then and I like it even less now. Take the opening song of their awful second album: it piles in with a half-decent, if ultra-processed, guitar riff then immediately buckles under the weight of its meagre expectations, devolving into tuneless sonic mush after just a few seconds. The rest of the album doesn't even come close.
And that's before I even get to the world's most overwrought third-form poetry masquerading as lyrics: "I order the foie gras and I eat it with complete disdain. Bubbles rise in champagne flutes, but when we kiss, I feel nothing." I mean, Jesus! Swap the foie gras and bubbly for a burger and coke and Kele would be a great contender for the replacement Alice In Chains frontman. The less said about the "East London is a vampire" line (how very Smashing Pumpkins a soundbyte!), the better.
The majority of their lyrics are supposedly insightful glimpses into the vacuous nature of London/drugs/the music business (as if it were some sort of revelation) or snapshots of failed trysts so painfully awkward you’d imagine Kele must have been confined to his bedroom until his twenties. I defy anyone to wrestle any profundity (bar profound nausea) from lines such as “And our love could have soared over playgrounds and rooftops/Every park bench screams your name/I kept your tie”.
Listening to Bloc Party is the musical equivalent of all the bad parts and insecurity of having sex or getting high for the first time, but with none of the pay off.
They are the Ultravox of indie, only they’re way too self-conscious to write anything as brilliantly campy as ‘Vienna’ or ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’, even by mistake.
I ingor bands like this so I don't know their music.. they sound bloody dreadful from your description. I will carry on ignoring them.
ReplyDeleteI really really liked Silent Alarm, and still regard it as the high-point of the early noughties post-punk revival. However, from then on, it's downhill all the way. The second album was lyrically embarrassing and musically weepy; the third album is actually pretty offensive in places, in terms of the prevailing sonic mood. Ares, the opener of "Intimacy" is probably one of the most atonal, inane and senseless pieces of 'music' ever written. Mercury, to its credit, boasts an almost hypnotic vocal hook. The rest of the album is real dross. They value production gimmicks above writing real songs, and it really hurts, because I know they were once able to write pretty decent songs - Silent Alarm is full of them.
ReplyDeleteNowadays, they sound like a band hell-bent on self-destruction.
Mediocrity aside, my disdain was confirmed recently when the band announced a special 'intimate' one-off sideshow here in Sydney. The catch: you have to be a Mastercard holder to purchase tickets. Makes me sick.
ReplyDeleteI got into Bloc Party with their third album, when they went a bit batshit and all the true fans hated it. All that shouted nonsense over bouncy-castle beats, it's quite adrenalising. "Speed, agility, super-strength!" Now that's something I can dance to.
ReplyDeleteHmmm… strict musical criticism aside. I think this band is a valuable snapshot of a moment in time as much as original music makers.
ReplyDeleteBeing highly subjective for a moment. I have enjoyed this band (mostly first two albums) because they seem to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of people aged between 20-30 in the first half of this decade. The Self-absorbed hedonism, the lack of attention span, the sheer speed at which technology and modern society seems to lurch at.
Sociologically speaking I find Bloc Party spot on as a mirror/portal to a very important segment of society. I couldn’t bump them up beside laudered groups/artists like Led Zeppelin or Janis Joplin but I believe they are equally as vital to their particular audience in helping define the craziness of adult youth in their specific moments in time.
Musically? They’re about as interesting as the latest mobile phone… which in the first decade of the new millennium is pretty important to some and dead boring to others.
I recall Djing each Friday/Saturday night some five or six years ago to a packed house and watching guys and gals getting drunk, searching out a mate for the night and generally showing pure abandon to the consequences of their thoughts and actions. I recall Bloc Party (as well as Franz Ferdinand) being the perfect soundtrack to such nights. It doesn’t make them great but it does make them relevant. And so, looking back into the annals of history, not everything at the Monterey Pop festival was great… but it was relevant.
As for what they "sound like"? I'll leave that in your hands.
my2c
Ok, I went outside. Did some gardening. Had a further think about this topic. It started raining so I came back inside. To summarise the above…
ReplyDeleteWhat I mean is that this is music that makes a lot of sense to a very specific social demographic and little sense to all other demographics. This is a common trait of music through the decades. This separation of relevance also applied to 90% of all music. Therefore you could hypothesise that the true and noble task of the critic is to uncover/identify the other 10% and work towards seeing it achieve it’s true place in the cannons of music history. This theory unfortunately falls over due to the need of a unifying and democratic voice in the realm of criticism for something to be widely noted for its musical worth. And most writers are hacks.
I don’t think this discredits, however, from the joy that an individual can garner from listing to these four Brits.
If someone enjoys music that I don't like, that's great. Good on 'em. I have no problem with that. I just like to explain why I don't like certain musics.
ReplyDeleteWhen it was released Silent Alarm served a function as decent music for walking to work through the smog of commuters every other morning. If Robert Smith was the lead singer of U2 and they released Boy and War now, it would sound like The Bloc Party. Damning them with faint praise is so easy.
ReplyDelete[...] This guy doesn’t have a point. (Everett [...]
ReplyDelete(From Facebook)
ReplyDeletePete Wylie likes this.
Everett True at 10:01pm July 6
I want to do a Facebook function that states "I like the fact Pete Wylie likes this". Anyone got any ideas?
Pete Wylie at 10:02pm July 6
credit where it's True...
Ady Vpop at 10:26pm July 6
and i want to like the fact that you like that fact that pete wylie likes this!
Simon Bridger at 12:55am July 7
Oh how i hate this band, no sorry hates too strong for such an average band, i feel sorry for them that they don't have much style or talent, that'll do.
Brett Wells at 12:56am July 7
You do realise you have 'Bloc Party' right next to the words 'Music That I Like'? That caught my attention.
Compelte and utter tripe of a band. good-o
It was articles like this that forced me to stop reading the NME in the late 80's.
ReplyDeleteAfter years of pushing bands such as A.R.Kane, the attention turned, almost overnight, to 'bands' such as Public Enemy.
It's happening again.
Bloc Party were a breath of fresh air when they first arrived and delivered 'Silent Alarm. Now they're slated. It's been the same with just about every other guitar band.
It even makes me wonder if critics even listen to anything at all - or whether they just sell their freebies on eBay and write 3- or 4-star reviews for their magazines, while then going online to deliver their 'real' thoughts (i.e. the band's crap, the album's crap, terrible production, terrible live, too commercial, they've sold-out - delete as applicable).
I just wish they'd stop trying to write dance songs for indie kids. 'Flux' is absolute fodder, as is their new single from what I've heard. I still rate Silent Alarm as a critical album of the time, and even AWITC had its moments. But in all honesty they haven't been able to match their debut, I don't think there's a strong argument against that - certainly not on record.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that given the explosion of the amount of music which can be accessed and listened to that the internet explosion has given us, what has become more important is the quality of individual songs. The 'career' of a band and the building of their brand, along with the companies that support this process are less important now than they once were. How many bands have sunk after one good album or a couple of catchy songs because there is no follow up. If a band gets big enough after their début then there is a carry over but in reality they are still feeding off their initial creative breakthrough. Bloc Party fall squarely in this category (along with Franz, The Killers, Maximo from their own generation and countless others in musical history) but what cannot be denied is that Banquet and Helicopter were (and are) classic alternative songs of this decade. It is a shame that Bloc Party have followed a spectacular downward trend from here on down but for me, I'll just listen to new records and judge them on their merit, you never know they might do something good again, or they might not. Whether or not they are Bloc Party is of no importance. The joy of the moment is that we are in an age of more music than any one person could possibly listen to. It is a time to worry less about bands' careers and brands and more about songs than make you feel something, wherever they come from.
ReplyDeletebetter to burn out or fade away, bloc party suck now but once they were everything, if they quit then would they be remembered, if the manics split after holy bible would they have been held in regard rather then mocked in that drouth before send away the tigers and was it worth in now that they're good again. Would joy division be of any worth if they hadn't changed their name after curtis or would their shit towards the end have soiled the name and could whatever the third removed new band are called have salvaged new order if they'd got good again without hook but with the same name. If the manics had come back under a different name would they have been the same band, without having to try to live up to their own legacy, how would it have affected the music and was it worth the periods of failure to keep that period of concluded project at bay keeping the critical opinion in flux. To split up before you become top heavy is noble. or is stupid. 'lost penguin' left after one EP, a burnt out spark of success. but noone will remember and as they carry on with one less member as 'not cool' with worse songs the point of it all gets lost. Back to bloc party. should they still be around making music. their new music is different only in tone, the song's the same and we're tired. But their use of electronics seems more like a journey than a destination, they could return with a warped work of genius and all would be forgiven. It's like the concept of burying married couples together, a few more years of life and they could have ended up at each others throats. you review by the last notable work until the end when you can look at the whole.
ReplyDeleteI saw them a couple of years ago in New York and found them utterly insufferable. It was like a bad combination of emo attitude with generically angular post-punk that's been done better a thousand times before, by a thousand other bands. Kele's puerile declarations from the stage were horribly and ickily sincere (sincerity as a pretense of authenticity), and I couldn't help but hear Johnny Rotten's voice in my head, snarling, "We really mean it, man." If there is an enemy, it's this kind of band, because people actually fall for their bullshit.
ReplyDeleteHello Everett.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about Talons. I hate it. I would like you to listen to their debut album, 'Silent Alarm', which is powerful, energetic, interesting, introspective, talented, and many other vaguely positive adjectives, in my opinion. I hate their new direction though
I love Silent Alarm and am currently listening to all other tracks, which i also like...
ReplyDelete[...] above were major influences (one way or another) on those who followed: Nirvana, Bis, Comet Gain, Bloc Party, the Cribs, the Gossip, the Ethical Debating Society, Kids Love [...]
ReplyDelete