Intimacy
Released just a year after their second album, *A Weekend in the City*, and shaped on the move in fast and furious recording sessions, *Intimacy* is the sound of Bloc Party sprinting boldly beyond their past guitar heroics. “Mercury” is a whirl of warped vocals and hectic rhythms, “One Month Off” hammers a snotty pop-punk banger into new, interesting shapes and “Ion Square” is *Silent Alarm*’s “So Here We Are” reconfigured as gorgeous, glitchy electronica.
We hoped Bloc Party's last record, A Weekend in the City, would be the group's version of U2's October-- an endearingly awkward transition between a bracing debut and a masterpiece every bit as outsized as the ambitions of its creators. Sadly, album number three is less War than Evil Urges.
In its short lifetime, Bloc Party has shown an admirable willingness to turn its back on what fans want. The relatively lightweight post-punk songs on 2005's solid Silent Alarm nose-dived into paranoid darkness on 2007's underrated A Weekend In The City, written in the aftermath of London's 7/7 bombings. Weekend drew…
Intimacy would have been a good name for Bloc Party's previous album, A Weekend in the City, which was so vulnerable and confessional that it often felt like barely edited diary entries set to music.
The cultural milieu that Bloc Party's third album, Intimacy, drops into is perhaps most perfectly summed up by the recent allegations that the Sex Pistols'...
<p>They've toughened up their sound with orchestral stabs and disembodied dance beats</p>