A Weekend In The City

6.9/10

Universality is a neat trick, and often is one that most can not conjure very well. Bloc Party starts off their sophomore effort A Weekend In The City with the line “Like the 80’s never happened”, if this is to be taken as the operating principle the band uses to make music, then it’s charmingly effective. The interesting thing about this album is that it plays with a dichotomy that is inherent to youth and inhabits Kele Okereke the band’s front-man.

The preceding line really plays that dichotomy well, because if the 80’s had never happened, it’s hard to think that this band would exist; however, imagining a world in which that decade was lost the band still sounds immediate, this is where the rub is. These songs are the commentary of a young man in a metropolitan setting experiencing the swirl of boredom, drugs, sex and longing. Okereke is a stunning lyricist and distills complex emotion quite well into affecting poetry, Waiting For The 7.18 the document of wistful longing for the “old days” is a tremendous example where he sings the lines “Just give me moments / not hours or days” a testament to the ennui that blanches all youth and counter-balances this with the lines “If I could do it again / I’d make more mistakes / I’d not be so scared of falling / If I could do it again / I’d climb more trees/ I’d pick and eat more wild blackberries” The song captures the lost and yearning young professional in a job that they hate extremely well. This album doesn’t stay confined within a formula, though it covers the gamut of being young in London well, The Prayer which portrays dancing in a club in a sort of half trance, Uniform a song that calls the culture of youth to task. The album cuts all of this with songs about institutional racism and religious hypocrisy Where Is Home? And homosexuality and meaningless sex Kreuzberg and I Still Remember. The only problem with this album is that the lyrics have such intense emotional impact that the music suffers from a lack of variation.

The instrumentation is not bad per se, but many of the songs maintain a very similar feel, almost too similar. The Prayer has a tribal feeling to it which carries it over intensely, and Hunting For Witches is excellent in its depiction of war on terror paranoia, but the “Bloc Party by numbers” feeling is stitched throughout this album and that unfortunately hooks the listener’s ear because of Silent Alarm’s high expectations.