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March 9th, 2005 by Shopping Bag I wanna live on this Bloc
Silent Alarm is more varied the band’s early work. The album spans edgy power pop, atmospheric ballads, and angular, percussive tracks that all sound spectacular because of the album’s big, layered production. The great single “Banquet” and even better opening track, “Like Eating Glass,” put Bloc Party’s heart-on-sleeve emotions in the service of tight, energetic songwriting that makes their earnestness a little easier to swallow. The gorgeous ballads also make the most of Bloc Party’s emotional directness: “Blue Light,” “This Modern Love,” and “So Here We Are” are some of Silent Alarm’s finest moments, with a tension and impact that show how powerful even their softest songs can be. As both the band and album’s names imply, Silent Alarm is an overtly political album. Bloc Party fare better than many other bands that dip into that fray, but the results are still mixed: the well-intentioned no-blood-for-oil sentiments of “Price of Gas” are heavy-handed, but “Helicopter”’s Bush-bashing and the antiwar “Pioneers” (“We promised the world we’d tame it/What were we hoping for?”) are relatively subtle, and work fairly well as political pop manifestos. Bloc Party’s dynamic power pop and sensible ballads throughout Silent Alarm are made even sweeter by the inclusion of bonus remixes (“Plans” by Mogwai and “Pioneers”" by M83.) Silent Alarm is a smashing debut album with a lot of passion and polish. The disc has been in my player non-stop, and probably will be for a long time to come. |
Bloc Party’s debut album, Silent Alarm, reveals them as a band equally informed by taut art-punk (think Franz Ferdinand or the Futureheads) and the grand gestures and earnestness of groups like Coldplay and U2. Though they’re not quite as stadium-sized expansive as either of those two bands (yet), Bloc Party sound a lot more comfortable making proclamations like “Positive Tension”’s “Something glorious is about to happen/A reckoning!” than just about any of their contemporaries.