thanks to bumpershine.com
Oh yes. They’re back. Those fun loving, Jack White dissing, multi racial English boys who write songs about witches, and alarm clocks, and military aircrafts. Yes, they are Block Bloc Party!
According to wikipedia, the band were discovered when Franz Ferdinand (when is Franz putting something new out?) champ Alex Kapranos (did you get that little title allusion?) was handed their demo. He liked what he heard, and soon the band were more talked about than Jesus on a sunday morning. Hello, NME album of the year and hello, hype.
Random comparisons to groups such as The Cure, Blur, Smashing Pumpkins, the Pixies and Joy Division soon occured, just ask wikipedia. Whilst the purposefully random, artless noise making evident in many a chorus-less Bloc track does bring to mind a little bit of Transmission, I find comparisons to Britpop pretties Blur more than a little confusing. However, I suppose both bands are British.
Anyway, they have a new single out for their upcoming and yet to be named third album, a sweet little ballad-y ode to chemistry, titled Mercury. And by that I mean a raucous, electronic ‘dancefloor anthem’ – to use a rarely true and highly irritating phrase. If this is a dancefloor anthem, we’ll all be dancing disjointed, sudden, malfunctioning-robot style moves. But whatever. That’s probably what Bloc Party want.
The lyrics: somewhat confusing. Alright, more than somewhat. But hey, it’s electronica, right? And it’s Bloc Party, right? We begin with Kele shouting/singing ‘My mercury’s in retrograde!’ (repeat, repeat, repeat, this making up most of the song) This means that his mercury is rotating backwards around the earth. Cool. I’m down with that.
The music: In keeping with the rotation theme, bits of the track are cut and pasted and rotated around, for example when Mercury is shouted for the millionth time, it stops mid word and starts again. Fabulous. Innovative. You look to your CD player, to see if the disc is skipping, before realising thaat you don’t listen to CDs anymore, and that the effect was, apparently, intentional.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind this little foray into electronica. For example, I loved Flux, probably because it was conventional, and I can handle conventional. Although, when I say unconventional, I simply mean that it incorporates elements such as a series of sentences shouted together without any chorus, or strongly memorable tune (although, eventually, the mercury retrograde line is a bit of an earworm), lots of beats and many poetic lines which make 0.006% sense when strug together -
“Bleeding gums and v-veins protruding
You try to hate all of your clothes
The Mayor’s in L.A. and she ain’t returning
I’m sleeping with people I don’t even like”
…MERCURY RETROGRADE REPEAATT
You’ve got to wonder, will those 9/10 music reviews keep on coming because this band is actually genius, or will they come because they’re too confusing and pseudo intelligent to be labelled otherwise? (see Kid A, not that I thought that weas particularly pseudo intelligent, more like just plain intelligent) Or perhaps the reign of one certain uber-hyped band is as over as my interest in them is.
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