Bloc Party

Hyped as the next big thing after Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, too, harked back to the sound of 20 years earlier (the British new wave) augmented with Brit-pop melodies and danceable tempos. The result, Silent Alarm (Vice, 2005), was brilliant in the way that the party-oriented new-wave revival can be, quoting everybody from XTC to Public Image Ltd via Gang Of Four and Joy Division, without actually achieving any synthesis at all. The album collects the early singles: the suspenseful and insistent She's Hearing Voices, the frantic and bombastic Helicopter, the quietly tense So Here We Are, the pounding disco of Banquet, the darkly lilting Little Thoughts. They present the poppy side of the band.
The edginess of Russell Lissack's guitar redeems the rest of the album, that cannot live up to the catchy refrains of the singles, helping to coin markedly different languages for the main songs: the hurriedly percussive trot of Like Eating Glass, the warped, wavering pseudo-ska-surf flights of Price Of Gas, the oneiric raga-like rambling of Compliments, the hysterical strumming of Pioneers. Far from being merely a set of party ditties, the album exhudes urgency and poignancy.

Unfortunately, the Brit-pop disease struck A Weekend In The City (Vice, 2007) and turned it into yet another tedious parade of predictable melodramatic melodies. Despite Hunting for Witches and Waiting for the 7:18, neither the arrangements nor the singing nor the lyrics do much to rise above the usual Brit-pop fluff. As a social fresco a` la U2 it is even more embarrassing than the U2 were.

Intimacy (Vice, 2008) was mediocre routine.