Kele Okereke, now going solo for good?
Once upon a time, this was the Next Big Thing
For me, this is their best album, because it was truest to their identity as a band. On its release, in 2005, there wasn’t actually that much going on in British Music. Britpop had been and gone a few years before, and Radiohead had disappeared into electronic backwaters which, although captivating and wonderful in their own right, didn’t quite have the same capture on the zeitgeist, the musical imaginations of the young as they once did.It had seemed to be America’s turn, for a while, and sadly they’d had nothing more to offer than a seemingly endless stream of horrific Nu-metal dross like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. In this climate, Bloc Party were a bit of a breath of fresh air- vibrant, angry, and exciting. I remember hearing ‘Helicopter,’ with its angular, urgent guitar parts, and ferocious drumming, and dancing round my room on my own for half an hour, like a giddy school kid.
The whole album was like that, the supercharged sound of a band who had paid their dues together live, and sounded fantastically tight and together. A lot of this was down to Tong’s drumming, in my opinion- just listen to ‘Positive Tension’ where he carries the track on his own for a good minute before anyone else really does anything, and it’s fantastic. A good friend of mine once said I drum a bit like that. I was glowing, I tell you, as when I heard this I genuinely thought he was one of the best drummers I’d heard in ages.
I really Like Lissack’s guitar playing on this record, too- it’s taught and angular, and seems to have learned all sorts of interesting lessons from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood about how to be abrasive and soulful at the same time. He also sounds like an afficianado of Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill, and it can be argued that this album is one of the major reasons that Gang Of Four were a fashionable name to drop, and that other bands were trying to sound ‘edgy’ and ‘angular’ for a year or two afterwards.
What else? Kele’s lyrics, which, for me, later devolved into incoherence, captured that magic in a bottle which someone like Thom Yorke or Mark E Smith manages- he’s not storytelling, more conjuring up images and atmospheres of a sort of modern unease. When he sings “Are you Hoping for a Miracle?” you don’t quite know the specifics of what he’s talking about, but somehow it feels right. In the same way, ‘This Modern Love’ is indirect, both hopeful and anxious at the same time. The lines ‘To Be lost in the Forest/to be caught adrift/you tried to reach me/you bought me a book’ addresses those indirect ways in which we try to reach out to those we love, to communicate through other means than words. In the same way, his promise in ‘So Here We Are’ that ‘I made a vow, to carry you home/I really tried to do what you wanted’ is touching, but also speaks of a certain weariness with romance. You don’t get any answers, because the protagonist doesn’t seem to have any answers.
More than the original contributions, however, it was the fact that this band sounded like a unit- unstoppable, completely together, the musical equivalent of a sledgehammer. I almost saw them live in a 200-capacity venue just before this album came out, but I was ill. Still kicking myself about that one, it would have been fantastic. Check this video of their UK TV debut out to see just how energetic and exciting they were at that point:
Luckily, Silent Alarm is there to record what they were at that time. If they don’t make any more records, it will remain as a testament to this band at their best.
