Zeroes' Heroes 10: Bloc Party - Silent Alarm [2005]
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i'll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
If i could give out an award for Most Promising Debut Of The Decade, without a doubt i'd give it to Bloc Party's Silent Alarm. Their mix of Joy Division-style drum & bass combined with Radiohead-like soundscapes and lyrics made them the most likely ones of their generation to gain the status of Rock Gods like R.E.M. and U2. But something went wrong after that.
A better title for this piece would be Me Trying To Unravel The Mystery Of Bloc Party. How could any band debut with a sound so distinctively their own, balanced but still with all the youthfull head-over-heals-enthusiasm you'd expect on a first album? And more important, a collection of songs most bands can only hope to compile on a Best Of.
The Mystery sort of unravelled itself every time Bloc Party released a new album, because a strange phenomenon seemed to connect all those bands with fabulous debuts in the 00s, like The Strokes, Interpol, Vampire Weekend etc. As soon as a follow-up appeared on the horizon, you realized that what made these bands stand out was more a carefully constructed function and form, instead of the romantic notion that it only takes a stroke of pure genius and a bit of luck to hit upon a unique sound. What that means to all music that comes after the initial introduction, is that there's not a lot of diversion to be discovered, just a continuation of the course set.
Bloc Party are really the prime example of that trend to me. Their following albums A Weekend In The City and Intimacy didn't add much to their sound, which downsized their remarkability in a way - if they can't come up with anything different from what they've done before, what's the difference between them and their copycats?
Now, about the album. Because i'm not here writing about what Bloc Party meant, but more about what they did ofcourse. The reason this album is not in the upper regions of my list, is The Curse Of Silent Alarm. Apart from all the good stuff i mentioned two paragraphs before, there are some things that can be held against it.
Most important, the album has always felt and still feels oversized to me. Thirteen tracks in a bit more than 50 minutes time doesn't seem much oversized on paper, but in the case of Silent Alarm it really is. That probably has a lot to do with the dense production and too similar sounding songs - after four years i still can't remember which title goes with which song.
The time that passed since its release has also helped picking out the weak songs on the album, although i can only choose two - Blue Light, Luno - that could've been left off the album to bring it down to more comprehensable proportions.
Enough bitchforking though... After seeing them live just a few weeks ago, finally something clicked between me and Bloc Party. Perhaps it was perfect timing, dancing in the light of a setting sun to This Modern Love - if only one song of them should be passed over to next generations, it should be that one - but no matter what, i saw a band that had a great bunch of songs to play, and played them well and with the same vigour with which they were recorded. A band that was one of the trendsetters during these past ten years.