When a band titles its newest record Intimacy, it would lead the listener to expect, you know, intimacy. Intimacy should ooze out of the pores of the album – the music should be able to hit the perfect emotional notes, the lyrics should be personal and relatable and the album as a whole should be warm and inviting.
So why would Bloc Party, a band noted in the past for jarring bits of guitar rock, go the personal route?
The question isn’t immediately answered, either. Opener “Ares” features singer Kele Okereke playing call and response with himself, as a jagged guitar squeals for attention in the background. “Trojan Horse” blazes under a dirty synthesizer line as Okereke wails about the inevitable end of a relationship. It’s not intimate, considering the music itself is so jagged and abrasive.
The more personal path does find its way into the mix, though. “Biko” leads it off four songs in, as an atmospheric, hypnotic guitar line weaves in between Okereke’s vocals. When the inevitable pre-programmed drum beats enter, the mood has been established so firmly, they only heighten the emotional appeal of the song.
It continues in “Signs,” where chimes and synthetic string stabs overlay a constant quarter-note kick drum. The guitar rock of Bloc Party albums past is but a distant memory here – luckily, when the band shoots for the intimacy promised in the title of the record, the best songs result.
While the guitar rock has mostly been replaced by distorted synthesizers, some songs still recall Silent Alarm, at least in essence. “One Month Off” forcibly shoves staccato chords to the forefront to create one of the catchiest songs on the album, as long as the superfluous distortion of Okereke’s voice toward the end is ignored.
Intimacy peaks with the brilliant “Ion Square,” the only song successfully marrying the gorgeous ballad with the more common synth-heavy tracks. The song moves quickly under a feverish drum beat, slowly piling layers and layers of new sounds on top of one another. Okereke seems to be at his most passionate, and when the tower of noise finally can reach no higher, gang vocals enter and the song climaxes satisfyingly.
Only “Ion Square” can truly achieve the intimacy promised in the title, though. While it works in the hallowed middle ground and a few songs on the album work on opposite sides of the slow-to-frenetic spectrum, many others simply don’t cut it.
There are the merely forgettable, such as the nondescript retail-only bonus track “Talons” (the album has been available online since August, and it gets a physical release today). Then there are the handful that skirt complete ridiculousness, with “Zephyrus” as a prime example. Bloc Party utilizes a faux-epic gothic choir to serve as rhythm under Okereke’s lyrics, and when the instruments cut out to leave the singer and his backup vocals, it sounds like a painfully bizarre mash up of Bloc Party and E.S. Posthumous.
Two of the other retail bonuses, “Your Visits are Getting Shorter” and “Flux,” become similarly ludicrous. The band moves from using synthesizers as a buffer to becoming entirely reliant on them, and whatever message Okereke tries to convey gets lost under mountains of vocoder and mindless, pulsating dance beats.
Somehow, Bloc Party has managed to create music on both ends of two entirely different ranges – they deal with both the intimate and the impersonal as well as the affecting and the awful. The unarguable successes – “Ion Square” and “One Month Off” come to mind – are effectively canceled out by the absurdity of songs such as “Your Visits are Getting Shorter” and “Zephyrus.” It leaves a shell of an album, one worth buying for its best moments and avoiding at all costs for its worst ones.
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RATING: 2 1/2 out of 5 stars
