A Weekend In The City

Music was never a big part of my life - but lately with the amount of Math T homework I'm sifting through there's never been a better time to go through albums (and improve my rusting taste). John Mayer's Continuum kept me alive during the SPM (about 50 replays or so, and counting) ... but I've got to move on. And quickly.

British Not Staid

It's fascinating, the bands that you come across for the weirdest of reasons - I first found Bloc Party while looking for header art - their first album Silent Alarm was the header image for Janus (yeah, copyright infringement, yada yada).


But then I found a review on Pitchfork. And in Stylus. And a snippet from Urb. And I was shocked: Silent Alarm was Universally Acclaimed. I started looking for their music.

I blanched.

It was horrible to my untrained ears back then: inventive guitar dischords, lyrics that were repeated over and over again, song structure that would be called inspired by some quarters but just plain weird to mine. But it grew on me, slowly, and I realized that Bloc Party was an acquired taste - the lyrics when repeated meant emphasis, the heavy Brit accent a cover for often heady messages. The song structure never tired in my ears - not your typical commercial fare of two passages, chorus, passage, chorus, bridge chorus end. You never actually know what you'll hear next - a hook in the next bridge ... is that even a guitar riff?!

A Weekend In The City came out on the 6th of February - their sophomore attempt - and it took a good 6 months before I finally got myself to download it (Math T played a part in my sudden inspiration).

It's good. A solid album for many a lesser band, but it's come out after what the international music community calls a dazzling debut ... and it suffers for it.


The album starts off confidently and pulls out all the stops - big hooks, big music, the same accent and the same taste for weird stuff that made the first album work. The theme is even headier than the first: The Problems of Modern Life ... Kele sings in Song For Clay (Disappear Here):

Oho, How our, how our parents they suffered for nothing
Live the dream, live the dream, live the dream
Like the 80's never happened
People are afraid, are afraid
To merge on the freeway
Disappear here

If it sounds like poetry ... it is. Song For Clay is a testament to how we're increasingly apathetic, even in our world of modern luxury. Then they sing of (Britain's?) paranoia of terrorists in Hunting For Witches, which in itself sounds catchy enough to last several replays. Of note is Uniform, easily the longest in the album:

There was a sense of disappointment as we left the mall
All the young people looked the same
Wearing their masks of cool and indifference
Commerce dressed up as rebellion

A Weekend In The City is not without its faults - of the songs Where Is Home? is a big mistake, painful even in my ears. And there's homosexual and casual sex references done badly in On, where the line You make my tougue loose being ambigious enough to invite reinterpretation. The weirdest is the lead single The Prayer, which took me four listens before falling head over heels in love with, but the range of music is narrower; the experimentation sounds more electronic than guitar based - and this is the album's biggest limitation.


Bloc Party's old fans (indie heads, most of them) may not like this more accessible work, but it's good news for the rest of us. Get it before attempting to dip your toes into Silent Alarm and be reminded just how gritty city life can be:

If I could do it all again I'd make more mistakes
Not be so scared of falling,
If I could do it again, I would climb more trees
I'd pick and I'd eat more wild blackberries

A weekend indeed.