 "Photo: COURTESY WITCHITA RECORDINGS/ATLANTIC")
For a record entitled "Intimacy," Bloc Party's third disc is anything but subtle and introspective.
Forming in the late 90s, these English rockers went through their share of lineup shuffling and name changes before finally hitting it big with their 2005 debut, "Silent Alarm."
The album immediately shot up to No. 3 in the U.K. on the back of heavy praise from British press, but like many of their fellow contemporary British acts, the album's homeland hype failed to generate similar waves across the pond.
On the new disc, Bloc Party attempts to hit the stadium circuit, this time by opting for arena-sized songs with shout-a-long choruses.
The first track, "Ares," named after the Roman god of war, dispels the notion that this will be an album filled with power ballads. Instead of a power hit, is an amorphous blob of fuzzed-out guitar noise, call-and-response lyrics, and pounding drums. The result is anything but tuneful and not worth a repeated listen.
Elsewhere, the disc dips into uncharted territory, leaving behind comparisons to bands like The Strokes and The Cure that have dogged the band since their arrival.
The album succeeds at broadening the group's musical palette, incorporating strings, horns, bouts of electronica, and the heavy usage of effects into their established mix.
However, despite the musical evolution, "Intimacy" fails to deliver more than a handful of memorable tunes.
"Mercury," the album's second track, repeats many of the opening song's mistakes.
The track's murky mix buries lead singer Kele Okereke's voice under a busy drum beat and vocal delays, and one can easily see why; when Okereke sings "my Mercury's in retrograde" repeatedly throughout the chorus, it proves that Bloc Party's weakness isn't their musicianship - it's their songwriting.
While Okereke strives for the lyrical life that Robert Smith of The Cure was able to bring to even the simplest of lyrics, here the results are mixed.
Okereke's high school notebook lyricism more closely resembles the mediocrity of Incubus front man Brandon Boyd, who also had penchant for oddly stressed syllables and emotional impotence, giving way to hit-or-miss results.
Bloc Party is better when they stick to their strengths. The track "Halo" bangs with a straightforward punk fury, and is one of the few tracks free from the album's constant overindulgence.
Finally released from the swaths of reverb and effects that choked the life out of earlier songs, "Halo" and it's oddly named follow-up "Biko" find the band regaining their footing.
"Biko" is the album's first mid-tempo song, one that finds Okereke singing about loss, the album's overarching theme.
Though the lyrics are as weak as those on earlier songs ("I keep writing these songs for you/ to save you from your grave"), the song's sparse drum machine beats and simple chords free it from the cacophony that dominated earlier efforts.
Anchored by multiple tracks of echoing backing vocals, Okereke's words get space to breathe. Displaying that even though he's no lyrical Lennon, with the right backdrop lyrics like "toughen up/ the world isn't kind to little things," can be used effectively.
These tracks prove to be the eye of the storm, as the band quickly abandons the track that they stumbled on in favor of rehashing earlier mishaps.
Lyrics with weak metaphors abound in the track "Trojan Horse," as Okereke drops more emotional clunkers with lines like "you used to take your watch off/ before we made love/ we didn't want to share our time with anyone" that make you wonder if he's trying.
Softer songs like "Signs," "Flux" and "Biko" somehow elevate themselves above the album's murk of techno and mosh-pit jams, the few rays of light in an otherwise empty album. Overall "Intimacy" fails to ever elevate itself above mediocrity, inhabiting a musical landscape with too many valleys and not enough peaks.
Peter Rizzo can be reached for comment at prizzo@student.umass.edu
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