Album Review: Bloc Party - Intimacy

One has to respect Bloc Party for their utter refusal to play safely into the desires of their audience. The majority of the world would be satisfied with a reprise of Silent Alarm, the London art-rock quartet’s occasionally majestic (though, let’s face it, a bit overlong) debut LP. Hell, if the jump their fan-base took after the release of A Weekend in the City, the band’s occasionally interesting (though, let’s face it, more than a bit overproduced) second LP, more than a few people wouldn’t even mind a reprise of that. But screw the whims of the fans: Bloc Party have, with latest album Intimacy, again chosen to follow their collective muse, transmuting themselves into something at once more polished and more heedless than their previous incarnations. And the results are remarkable. Occasionally.

While Bloc Party were never really about subtlety, their brand of danceable, post-punk worshipping music, even with its intermittent flashes of punk abandon, usually managed to keep itself politely restrained, never getting rowdy enough to be kicked out of the party. Intimacy, on the other hand, is the polar opposite of restraint. Kele Okereke and Russell Lissack’s guitars have been downtuned, virtually every track on the album benefits from some big beat-inspired electronic accompaniment, and stylistic shifts – both a full brass horn section and the Gregorian chants of a choir play a prominent role at points in Intimacy – are as abundant as they are unpredictable.

Lead track “Ares” is your first hint that this album has no interest in moderation. The song explodes into a chaos of wailing guitar sirens and fierce drums pounding over some bottom-heavy electronic pulses. Tong, in particular, is brilliant here as he is throughout much of Intimacy, laying down beats that are as complex as they are infectious. Okereke, too, makes the most of his limited vocal range, delivering his lyrics with a flamboyant self-assurance. And despite all this blatant excess, despite a lack of any prominent hook, the song manages to avoid becoming the utter mess that it should be.

This surrender to excess continues for much of the album. The prominent guitars of “Halo” approach heavy metal in terms of crunch and riff weight, and lead single “Mercury” relies on a glitched out vocal track and a catchy bass-synth riff as the primary means of getting its point across. And while the energy of Intimacy’s more energetic tracks comes close to swallowing them whole, a few quiet, introspective songs, such as “Biko” and “Signs”, are sprinkled throughout the album’s over forty minute runtime, though it must be said that these tracks owe more to the cloying romanticism of A Weekend in the City than they do the delicate chill of Silent Alarm.

It’s in these moments, in which Intimacy tries to get intimate, that the album flounders. Okereke’s lyrics are partly to blame. During electro-rock freakouts like “One Month Off”, it’s easy to ignore his at times uninterestingly blunt lines. On somber numbers like “Signs”, when Okereke’s falsetto croon of “At your funeral, I was so upset” is put on a pedestal, it’s a bit harder. The other problem with these subdued tracks is that, while the immoderate flavor of “Ares” is interesting at worst and empowering at best, the lack of restraint on “Signs” is just oppressive. Instead of spiky guitars and warring electronics, we get something awash in string-soaked sentiment and romance, something that takes itself so seriously that it’s doubtful that anyone could take it seriously.

Despite these hiccups, though, Intimacy remains an accomplished album, perhaps Bloc Party’s most concise and powerful statement to date. Sure, it sometimes gets lost in its self-perceived importance, but try to stick with it through its few bursts of adolescent over-romanticism. If you don’t, you’ll be missing out on something that’s, yes, only occasionally remarkable – but it’s within those remarkable moments that the idea of an older and wiser Bloc Party penning the next Ok Computer seems plausible.