bloc party another weekend in the city download

The album begins with Russell Lissack’s cascading washes of processed guitar, crafting space and atmosphere before drummer Matt Tong’s hissing hi-hats surge into a muscular pulse that just makes you want to move. Those seemingly disparate elements come together beautifully on Silent Alarm. “We wanted there to be dancefloor moments… That was a big part of what we were about, so we wanted there to be a nod or wink to the atmospherics and dynamics of dance and electronic music.” The quartet drew inspiration from the music that bonded them growing up as ‘alternative kids’ in inner-London – American underground acts like Sonic Youth, Pavement atmospheric post-rock by Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the late-night club world where they’d congregate to dance and party. That was the only gameplan really, that we knew we had to prove ourselves.” It was important to show there was a sense of depth and roundness to the music that we wanted to make. It wasn’t just this spiky, scratchy cool-sounding thing. “Making Silent Alarm, we were conscious we wanted to something that felt completely in technicolour. To craft music with body, life, and a pulse.

Heading to Copenhagen in mid-2004, for a six-week stint at Delta Lab Studios to record their debut album with producer Paul Epworth, the band was keen to make something that couldn’t be typecast as “pale, grey and skinny” post-punk. “I personally didn’t understand because I wasn’t so into that kind of music,” he tells Double J’s Gemma Pike in 2018. Media buzz around Bloc Party’s 2004 EPs (May’s self-titled debut and December’s Little Thoughts) was glowing but dominated by references to Gang of Four (a group the band says they didn’t hear until after Silent Alarm) and the post-punk revival – a movement Bloc Party didn’t want to be lumped in with, and which frontman Kele Okereke didn’t identify. Now, on the eve of Bloc Party returning to Australia next month to perform Silent Alarm in full, Kele joins us for an inside look back at what they’ve achieved, and what happens next. The ups and downs of their career have been defined by experimenting in order to reach new audiences and creative territory, their ever-changing sound unified by frontman Kele Okereke. Earnest, emotional, frenetic – it helped shape the tone for a raft of guitar-driven groups that came in its wake, only for Bloc Party to jettison and expand from a sound they helped popularise.įrom the prolific late ‘00s period that produced their next two albums, A Weekend In The City and Intimacy, to the line-up changes that resulted in 2016’s more subdued Hymns, they’ve incorporated more ambitious elements and electronic sounds in order to push forward. Their career bolted out of the gate with their era-defining 2005 debut album Silent Alarm. Bloc Party are one of Britain’s most enduring but curious indie rock successes.

Bloc party another weekend in the city download