Bloc Party release shows a changing sound

By Jordan Sargent

Published Aug. 28, 2008

The song titles alone are enough to give pause. The first four of Bloc Party's third, rush-released album are: "Ares," "Mercury," "Halo" and "Biko." For a band that, since its epochal debut, has been threatened to be taken under by lead singer Kele Okereke's heavy-handed lyrics, song titles this bland and metaphysical probably mean Kele is singing about bullshit, no matter what.

And, well, he is, though there is certainly enough blame to go around for the other three. Mostly, Intimacy stands as the greatest bit of evidence for those who say that Okereke has slowly morphed into one of the most self-involved and misguided lyricists in modern rock. There was plenty of fodder on Bloc Party's last album, A Weekend in the City, though, so it's the rest of the band's descent into mediocrity and the painfully bad ideas that really make Intimacy such a frustrating head-scratcher.

A Weekend in the City saw Okereke railing against religion, modern youth, racism and other big ideas. Although he wasn't exactly deft about it, it was endearing, at least, to see Okereke tackling such subjects, especially with the added weight of being a black frontman in an otherwise all-white band and genre. The album's loose concept, based upon Okereke's disillusionment with city life, strung the album along nicer than expected, forcing Okereke to narrow the scope of his songs and sharpen his language.

Most importantly, Bloc Party as a whole successfully morphed from a taut and spiky dance-rock band with a knack for writing heart-stopping ballads into a band ready to appeal to the masses. The guys appeared fined-tuned, sharpening and serrating their guitars on songs like "Hunting for Witches" and "Uniform" and writing ballads fit for expansive skies and wide screens. As a second album from a band with a voracious, and arguably detrimental, need to evolve its sound, it was nearly pitch-perfect, and it still holds up surprisingly well.

Intimacy, on the other hand, reveals Bloc Party as a band that is lost within itself, or more worrisome, a band that is rapidly running out of good ideas.

Most troubling is its morbid curiosity with basic electronic elements that only drive the members away from being one of the best modern rock bands in the world, which, when they are playing straight up rock music, they are. Clunkers like "Ares" and "Zepherus" find the band chopping up Okereke's vocals, exposing themselves as drum machine novices, looping gothic choir samples, etc. Their forays into electronics here reveal them as not only foolish, but also uninspired, a band that thinks running vocals through a computer automatically makes them "interesting."

There are still good moments and salvageable songs. The second single, "Trojan Horse," is the album's best rock song and is a track stuffed in the middle of the album that rumbles through like a Transformer. "Signs," which follows, is a strikingly pretty ballad, especially since it's basically just a glockenspiel loop augmented by fake strings. The last song, "Ion Square," manages to match the weightless upward momentum of "I Still Remember," and the last minute of "Better than Heaven" proves that Bloc Party is arguably at its best when the guys are just ripping solos and pounding drums.

Overall, there are too many awful, Metro Station-sounding rock songs and too many potential good moments ruined by the band's electronic impulses for us to be anything more than scavengers. Maybe someone will remind the band that one of its most affecting songs, "Blue Light," is also its simplest.