:: Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

Bloc Party

Imagine that you are walking through the curvy London streets looking for a familiar place. You‘re in a hurry and you seem to keep taking the wrong turn and becoming progressively more lost. Resultantly, stress starts to manifest itself physically in the droplets of perspiration forming on your forehead. The weather is changeable. Around one bend it is surprisingly warm, and around the next there is a breeze that makes you pull your coat close around you. However, although you are feeling tense because you can't seem to find where you're going, you begin to realise that around each twist in the road is some kind of serendipitous surprise; an old man in an Elizabethan wig who is selling colourful lollipops, a beautiful woman dancing barefoot, a postman with a smile like a home-cooked meal. South London is like that, a place where things start out one way and never finish how they're supposed to. It is also where Bloc Party makes their home and their songs suffer from that same delightful peripeteia. The conflict in Bloc Party's oeuvre is reflected through their debut LP's oxymoronic title 'Silent Alarm.’ Most of the album‘s tracks are propelled by an awesome rhythm section from which splay transient melodies that create the slightly stressful feeling one is on a musical journey, that although interesting, has no definitive destination. The aptly named 'Positive Tension’ channels this angst-ridden vibe into an amazing pop-rock song. Opening track ‘Like Eating Glass’ is suitably titled, but by the fourth track ‘Banquet,’ what at first seemed like choking on glass, now seems like devouring Cartier diamonds. The tracks on ‘Silent Alarm’ have the stream of consciousness feel of At The Drive In but with the deliberately intricate helter-skelter structure of an Interpol song. Just when you decide you don't like a tune, a new riff introduces itself to you and wins you over with its erratic charm. There is never a dull moment on this release and despite Bloc Party's rather obvious musical reference points they have their own unique sound. It is both strangely frustrating and satisfying at the same time, and which is fundamentally what good art should be.