Bloc Party gives Weekend in the City

By Jordan Sargent

Published Feb. 2, 2007

Hate to use the cliché, but A Weekend in the City, Bloc Party's follow up to the near-classic Silent Alarm, is literally a roller coaster. It dips and dives from racism to (autobiographical?) teen homosexual attraction and suicide. It's tough to tackle, and once it all sinks in, it's even tougher to swallow. It's an album of emotional peaks and valleys, but Bloc Party manages to convey these feelings of intense euphoria, anger, sadness and fear all within one thematic template — and that's what's most striking about A Weekend in the City.

That thematic template sees the band infusing the twitchy, jagged post-punk of its past with (don't run from me) guitar atmospherics, hip-hop elements, backing vocal harmonies and a host of other bells (literally) and whistles (not so much). Think the anthemic qualities of "Pioneers" meets the epic guitars of "So Here We Are" and the thumping drums of "Like Eating Glass," which was produced by Timbaland.

That sounds admittedly like an award-winning recipe for disaster. But wisely, the band and actual producer Jacknife Lee push the most familiar elements - top-heavy guitar lines, Matt Tong's ridiculously great drumming and, most notably and importantly, singer Kele Okereke's voice — to the forefront. Because of this layering, it takes many listens to completely notice and fully process the new sounds that are stuffed into the nooks and crannies of A Weekend in the City.

Probably the best example of this is the stellar lead European single "The Prayer," which builds itself on a Young Liars-era TV on the Radio chorus of hums, and an earth-shattering kick drum to hand-clap beat. But dig deeper and you'll notice a synthesizer and glitches of white noise and Tong rattling off a rap worthy high-hat rhythm. It makes for good headphones stuff, but all the songs here still sound weeping and massive.

For my money, Silent Alarm was Tong's album. He was the obvious V12 behind the dark and seductive dance-punk. But A Weekend in the City is undoubtedly Okereke's. His lyrics here are straightforward, direct and painstakingly anecdotal. His stories are punctuated with the stuff of diaries: therapy found in Sudoku ("Waiting for the 7.18"), detailed nights in Germany (the U-Bahn and Hauptbahnhof on "Kreuzberg"), tirades against robotic youth culture ("Uniform") and enough twisted, beautiful tales of love to make your heart implode.

But A Weekend in the City's politics will undoubtedly be the album's big story. Okereke is painfully blunt — sometimes uncomfortably so — and very calculated. When he does decide to lash out here at pointed intervals, it leaves a stinging effect.

"Hunting for Witches" was inspired by the terrorist bombings of London in the summer of 2005, and it tells a first-person tale of being in a media-caused, fear-driven fury with lyrics such as, "I watched TV, it informed me.../ There must be accountability.../ So I go hunting for witches."

The most arresting of the bunch, though, is closer "SRXT" where Okereke, who comes from a deeply religious family, scorns faith: "If you want to know what makes me sad/ Well it's hope/ The endurance of faith."

Is A Weekend in the City better than Silent Alarm? No. Bloc Party would have to truly make a classic to do that.

But it is a superb album from a band that's sound has taken a huge leap but not so much that it ever sounds messy. It's a triumphant follow-up in every sense of the word.