Chris Reinhard's Reverie Machine

Bloc Party - Ion Square

For fun: here’s the description of Intimacy that I wrote for Elitish’s “How to be an indie rock music critic” column:

While progressively distancing itself from the lyrical integrity of the politically charged Silent Alarm, London’s perseverant Bloc Party is at the precipice of sonic revolution. The incorporation of a deft instrumental range and an internally unprecedented sense of urgency force this critic to nostalgically recall Gang of Four—if it fathered the love child of a freshly emancipated post-Genesis Peter Gabriel. Combining both postmodern and contemporary influences for the first time, the foursome have established a pair of releases and amalgamated them into one, providing any keen listener with an appetizing palate from which to ear-nibble.

On ‘Ares,’ the fluttering machinegun percussion and air-raid guitar riffs mash together cold and alarming like D-Day vessels against the shores of Normandy. Singer Kele Okereke stutters monosyllabically over the hard milieu, channeling Wesley Willis as if he were the general of the retarded army.

Perhaps the record’s closing arrangement, ‘Ion Square,’ is its most impressive: catapulting the firestorm of intensity that marked the Intimacy’s early tracks head-on into the playful honesty of its later half, the song begins as a fuzzy, watery epic and slowly unglues en route to an atmospheric close. Like Weekend in the City’s ‘I Still Remember,’ ‘Ion Square’ harbors, at times, the most of Bloc Party’s pop sensibility, the guitars and electronic rhythm ethereally meandering around its chorus.

In a 2007 NME interview, Kele Okereke adamantly refused that Bloc Party’s upcoming third album would incorporate a concept or a theme like the band’s previous two releases. Yet Intimacy is as lyrically predictable as it is sonically incomprehensible; Okereke’s words will surely permeate the collective emotionalisms of melodramatic twenty-somethings the English-speaking world over. Seemingly taking cues from the brilliantly underappreciated Joy Division and its fated frontperson Ian Curtis, the group draws silly pictures of intimacy broken and soured. On ‘Trojan Horse,’ Okereke begins with a stomachache-inducing line: You used to take your watch off before we made love / You didn’t want to share our time with anyone. Blunt, youthfully poetic and frighteningly uninspired, the feeling lends itself to numerous tracks on the record and manages to take something away from the dazzling richness of Paul Epsworth’s production.

Yet from the ground up, Intimacy is a portrait of two factions progressing in different directions: the musicians’ half of Bloc Party has become wide-eyed and careful, while Kele Okereke as a lyricist has become seemingly jaded and uninspired in the wake of the band’s success. Only time will tell whether the two can coexist.