Bloc Party: It's Time To Get Serious

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 1, 2007

In the 2005 song "Positive Tension," Bloc Party promised "something glorious is about to happen, a reckoning."

And it did. The Essex-born, now London-based quartet's critically acclaimed debut, "Silent Alarm," went platinum and won NME's "album of the year" honors, and the band toured the world with a propulsive, post-punk amalgam of dance rock and art rock that drew on such home-brewed influences as the Cure, Gang of Four and Joy Division as well as such American acts as the Pixies, Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins. Along with Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs and the Futureheads, Bloc Party helped revitalize the British guitar rock movement.

Emerging bands love manifestoes, and the one on Bloc Party's Web site initially described the group as "an autonomous unit of un-extraordinary kids reared on pop culture between the years of 1976 and the present day." Now "the present day" is two years further along, and Bloc Party's second album, "A Weekend in the City," seems to be more about glorious things that didn't happen, promises not kept and dreams deferred.

In "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)," the album's opening track, singer-guitarist Kele Okereke mournfully confesses that "I am trying to be heroic in an age of modernity / I am trying to be heroic as all around me history sinks." Okereke, who writes all of Bloc Party's lyrics and melodies, adds, "So I enjoy and I devour flesh and wine and luxury / But in my heart I am lukewarm / Nothing ever really touches me." The song then spins into a taut catalogue of hedonistic behavior before Okereke says, "East London is a vampire, it sucks the joy right out of me."

"Hunting for Witches" addresses terrorism-fueled paranoia and the British tabloid media's post-911 Islam-phobia, while "Uniform" examines cookie-cutter youth culture. The bitter "Where Is Home?" looks at racism from a personal perspective -- Okereke's Nigerian parents immigrated to England before he was born in Liverpool 25 years ago (his father is a molecular biologist, his mother a midwife) -- and makes no attempt to disguise his second-generation protagonist's frustration ("In every headline, we are reminded that this is not home for us") and rage ("I want to stamp on the face of every young policeman / To break the fingers of every old judge").

Party music this is not. Even the sound has evolved, thanks to producer-remixer Garret "Jacknife" Lee, who has worked with U2, Snow Patrol, Kasabian and Bjork. There's less of the jittery, fidgety funk built on staccato guitars and disco drum beats and more synths, strings and processed sounds. Like the band's mood, the album's textures are darker.

Calling from Lausanne, Switzerland, during the band's 13-country European tour, Okereke says, "As a band, we became confident about what it is we wanted to say, and that will only come after you've made your first record."

Some critics have suggested that the new album's weightier tone is about the band's difficulties after "something glorious" happened to them after making "Silent Alarm."

"To be honest, we were always skeptical about the nature of success or certainly how it's presented in the U.K.," Okereke says lightly. "You grow up to be skeptical of people that are famous or successful -- you can almost feel the shame of that sort of thing. It wasn't like we'd suddenly become jaded at the end of 2005. I think we were already very cynical about what was happening before it happened, but you want to cling to some sort of artistic integrity. That's how we got through it, really. I don't think this second record's a more somber affair because we've become jaded by our success. It's a more somber affair because of the issues we're talking about on the record."

"Silent Alarm" had its serious moments -- "Helicopter" and "Pioneers" critique the Iraq war; "Price of Gas," its political roots and environmental consequences. There were plentiful dark lyrics set to uplifting melodies and, Okereke says, "a real unclear, unfocused energy or tension -- that's what the first record was supposed to be about. I thought, lyrically, I couldn't really rely on that again, and I wanted [the new album] to feel like a document of where my head was at now."

As for the new album's dramatically different sound, Okereke says he could live happily without ever hearing another reference to " 'spiky guitars' or 'angular punk funk.' Musically, there were so many guitar bands coming out in the U.K. that were doing a similar thing to what we were doing, I felt really dislocated with that whole punk-funk thing. That was the last thing we wanted to do with this record. We don't want to just be rehashing ourselves."

Ourselves would be Okereke and lead guitarist Russell Lissack (they've known each other since school days a decade ago), drummer Matt Tong and bassist Gordon Moakes. Forming in 2002 and taking the Bloc Party name a year later, they made an indie single, "She's Hearing Voices," that they thrust into the hands of Radio One DJ Steve Lamacq at a Franz Ferdinand/Domino Records party. Lamacq played it and had the band record a live session for his show. "Silent Alarm," which mixed earnest ballads, dance tracks and a handful of political commentaries, arrived a year later.

According to Okereke, the sound and subjects of "Silent Alarm" were inspired by the time he and his bandmates were at university by day and hanging out in dance clubs by night. After two years touring behind "Silent Alarm," that world seemed to have changed dramatically, as would the band's sound. "A Weekend in the City" is a bleak portrait of modern life in post-millennial, post-Middle East-crisis England "because that's what I was observing in all my friends who were at home working or at university and now going into their career," Okereke says.

"There was a real malaise everywhere," he continues. "And every book that I was reading or every film that I saw that resonated with me, they all seemed to have this existential angst, and that really fed into what I wanted the record to be about: people in very mundane, ordinary situations but with this real level of alienation and dislocation underneath the surface, because that's literally all I was seeing when I was going back home to see my friends and my loved ones. All the optimism that we had at university about how we were going to make a difference had completely evaporated, and now there was just a real sense of disillusion."

At one point, the new album was titled "Post War Britain."

Elsewhere, Okereke addresses the empty escapism of drugs and alcohol. Describing false drug-fueled confidence in the anxious "On," Okereke sings, "You make my tongue loose / I am hopeful and stutter-free" (in conversation, he speaks slowly and softly with an occasional stutter) but insists any temporary high is followed by "a flatness bleaker than the one it replaced." Prescription drugs are addressed as well, with much the same consequence. In the majestically melancholy suicide meditation "SRXT" -- for Seroxat, a British version of the anti-depressant Paxil -- Okereke sings: "If u want to know what makes me sad / Well it's hope, the endurance of faith / A battle that lasts a lifetime / A fight that never ends."

But it's not all gloom. Toward the album's end, there's a lovely trio of love songs, starting with a yearning "Kreuzberg," set against the divides of the Berlin Wall and the one between intimacy and casual sex. The majestic "I Still Remember" looks at the thin line between friendship and romance, while "Sunday" insists on the possibility of "a private kind of happiness."

And on "Waiting for the 7:18," Okereke evokes the kind of anxious insecurity he found coming home last year, singing, "If I could do it again, I'd make more mistakes / Not be so scared of falling."

"Bear in mind the album isn't at all autobiographical," Okereke says. "There are parts of it that are, but very few. In that song I was really trying to conjure an image of this kind of midlife crisis, the late-30-year-old who had all these expectations in his youth and has come to realize that same old drudgery and routine is now what it's like -- it's about somebody coming to terms with the deadening nature of who he is and wishing they'd been more adventurous."

Like leaving college for the uncertainties of music? What career path had Okereke been on before he decided to be "more adventurous"?

"I was doing English literature at university," he replies. "Not as a career but because I had to get out of my parents' house. I don't know what I would have done, I really don't. The prospect of working in an office in that environment still fills me with complete dread, really. That why I knew I had to make this work."

Bloc Party Appearing Sunday at DAR Constitution Hall

Sources: In talking about the new album, Kele Okereke has cited such inspirations as author Bret Easton Ellis, whose "Less Than Zero" is an obvious influence on "Song for Clay," and Michel Houellebecq, a French novelist whose "The Possibility of an Island" addresses the moral bankruptcy of contemporary culture.