Skip to content
Reviews

Bloc Party, ‘Intimacy’ (Atlantic)

After the success of 2005’s spiky, straightforward debut, Silent Alarm, Bloc Party took an undeserved thumping for last year’s more textured, politically minded, and ultimately better A Weekend in the City. Intimacy looks forward and backward: Enlisting producers from both of their previous records seems like a perfectly sensible way to achieve a satisfying hybrid of past successes — but who let these mammoth-sounding drum machines in here?

Intimacy‘s epically left-field opening comprises “Ares” (whose block-rockin’ beats and raving sirens are either an homage to, or blatant bite of, the Chemical Brothers’ “Setting Sun”), and the similarly frantic “Mercury,” whose buzzes, thumps, and staccato, sample-happy vocals are new to this Party. Those two songs are gambits in the vein of Radiohead’s “Idioteque” — unexpected and initially off-putting, but eventually understandable in context.

After that exhausting one-two punch, things settle down: “Halo” and “One Month Off” take the jackhammer, post-punk Silent Alarm route, while “Trojan Horse” and “Biko” go for Weekend-like subtlety and quietude. All the while, Kele Okereke’s lyrics make it clear the album’s title is no accident: This is his relationship record, and his words can be charmingly prosaic (“I’m sitting in Soho trying to stay drunk”) or monumentally clumsy (“I love my mind / When I’m fucking you”). But even as Intimacy gets sonically or lyrically precarious — “Zephyrus” recalls “Jesus Walks,” for Christ’s sake — it does so while reaching hard toward something exhilarating.

BUY:

iTunesAmazon