Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City

When you load Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City into your CD player, you won't be greeted by dueling guitars or aggressive percussion. Rather, you will hear front man Kele Okereke quietly intoning the problems of idealism and modernity over some gentle guitar strumming. It's an awfully meek inauguration of the band's sophomore effort, considering the group's bombastic singles and frenetic live performances, but Okereke's quiet introduction nicely sets the stage for A Weekend in the City.

Bloc Party's latest is conceptually and emotionally more sprawling than the band's debut, Silent Alarm. Far more ambitious in lyrical scope, the album tackles drug abuse, working-class troubles, immigration, racial conflict and homosexuality in its 50-minute runtime. For all practical purposes, A Weekend in the City is a concept album about the tribulations of city life, and Okereke wants to make his intentions clear from the beginning of the album.

Even if the concept behind the album is nice, however, fans may be worried that Okereke is sacrificing the power of his band's signature rock anthems for lyrical content. Fortunately, the album's ambition doesn't steal from Bloc Party's energetic guitar work. It takes all of 67 seconds for Okereke's timid strumming on "Songs for Clay (Disappear Here)" to evolve into a thumping balls-out rock song. It's a comforting reassurance, proving to listeners that Bloc Party has hardly lost its confidence or strength.

As searingly awesome as "Song for Clay" is, the album's next few songs are even better. One such highlight is "Hunting for Witches." The song stutters to life with a catchy sound collage before thumping percussion and jangled guitars get the song's blood pumping. Listeners will quickly get caught up in the song, and before they know it, Okereke is singing an affecting chorus about an average man living through July's London bombings. This is how the best moments in A Weekend in the City work – the band draws you in with its raw energy, and Okereke seizes the opportunity to get his message across.

"The Prayer," A Weekend in the City's centerpiece, is Bloc Party's other truly brilliant moment. Lyrically, the song is passable but forgettable, simply showcasing Okereke's desire to be the center of attention in a dance club. Fortunately, it is utterly stunning musically. Combining an Afro-stomp beat, synth-strings and Okereke's quirky vocals with more traditional indie rock melodies, "The Prayer" is perhaps Bloc Party's best song to date.


Bloc Party - "The Prayer"
Sadly, these three brilliant songs (along with the decent "Waiting for the 7.18" and "Uniform") comprise the first five tracks of the album. A Weekend in the City may blow you out of the water for its first 20 minutes but then the record begins to become stale. There is a conspicuous lack of energy and experimentation in the latter half of the album. Bloc Party's latest is incredibly front-loaded, almost embarrassingly so. A Weekend in the City is like a runner who sprinted as hard as he could at the start of a race but could hardly cross the finish line.

If only Bloc Party had released its first five songs as an EP, this release would have been legendary. It's a little depressing that Bloc Party didn't have enough ideas to sustain an entire album. At least Okereke's lyrics remain consistent even as the album begins its swift decent from epic to ordinary. Hopefully the band's next album will produce music good enough to buoy Okereke's heartfelt messages. Until then, I'll be listening to the first half of A Weekend in the City on repeat.

Originally published for the Cavalier Daily:
http://www.cavalierdaily.com/news/2007/feb/15/bloc-party-rages-for-five-songs-but-quickly-dies-o/

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Some Loud Thunder

Imagine you are a devoted Clap Your Hands Say Yeah fan. You were at the forefront of their internet explosion, you have attended at least five of their concerts, you've heralded the band as the forerunners of DIY ethic and you wear artsy T-shirts of theirs at least twice a month. Now, imagine you have just purchased Some Loud Thunder, Clap Your Hand Say Yeah's sophomore album, and you put it in your CD player with eager anticipation.

What greets your ears is not the sultry sounds of CYHSY's signature Talking Heads-style indie pop. Rather, the first track is a shitty-sounding rock song reminiscent of an early Neutral Milk Hotel recording ripped from a damaged cassette tape. Of course, CYHSY has always had a penchant for alienating listeners from the get-go – see the inane opening track, "Clap Your Hands!," from their last album for evidence. But that song was truly amusing, a carnival-style romp intended to remind the listener that music is not all seriousness, it's also fun.

This time around, the opening track is grating and obnoxious – it never really gets off the ground, and will likely force many to peel off their headphones with a pained grimace. Furthermore, the next two songs do little to clean out these damaged ears. They are little more than mediocre pieces in the general vein of their original style.

The excellent fourth track, "Love Song No. 7," begins a series of redeeming tunes. It showcases a new direction for the band, where noodling guitars are exchanged for a sultry piano line and a haunting string section. The melancholy sound may be unfamiliar to listeners, but it's a highly successful experiment and it signals a welcome shift in the quality of the album.

Following on the heels of "Love Song No. 7" is "Satan Said Dance," CYHSY's foray into indie dance. Another brilliant modification of the band's traditional sound, "Satan Said Dance" showcases a penchant for schizophrenic electronic music and driving bass. "How did I arrive at a place like this?" intones front man Alec Ounsworth, something listeners may be wondering as well by this point.


Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - "Satan Said Dance"
From here on out, the record offers a fair share of rewarding moments in between its duller pieces. "Goodbye to the Mother and the Cover" is a pleasantly melancholy composition driven along by both a resigned bass guitar and a hopeful xylophone. Later on, the neurotic vocals and irresistible chorus of "Yankee Go Home" practically force one to learn the lyrics and sing along. The closer, "Five Easy Pieces," offers a satisfyingly exultant end to the record.

There are certainly problems with Some Loud Thunder. It's inconsistent, it stumbles, it strains. But even if it doesn't trump the band's debut, Some Loud Thunder is something of a comfort. It offers listeners several gems, and shows off a band with real talent and an eagerness to experiment with new sounds. Really, that's all we could ask for, right?

Originally published for the Cavalier Daily:
http://www.cavalierdaily.com/news/2007/feb/08/still-clap-your-hands-but-no-standing-ovations-thi/

Thom Yorke - The Eraser

When The Eraser first leaked many months ago, most of Radiohead's rabid fan base exploded with praise. It was basically a preconditioned response: there is a small but determined faction of people in the world who believe that every piece of music graced by Thom Yorke's voice is an instant classic. To be fair, he's the cultural icon of one of the most popular and inventive bands in recent memory, and an undeniably talented man. But without the rest of Radiohead there to flesh out and fortify his ideas, Thom Yorke's solo debut stumbles and falters noticeably a few times.

The Eraser felt naked, sketch-like, unfinished. You could imagine Thom Yorke writing it alone in his bedroom late at night, clad in jammies and worrying about the world's impending doom. The album artwork is itself a reflection of the record's sound: simple, two-dimensional, black and white, paranoid, unsettling. The record melds together: each song can sound the same as the last, and there is little experimentation. The middle portion of the album can become almost embarrassingly tedious. Some of Thom Yorke's lyrics are wince-worthy, most notably the lines "I'm a dog for you / I'm a lap dog / I'm your lap dog" in "Skip Divided". Simply put, The Eraser sometimes feels boring and underwhelming.

Given my problems with the record, many of you may be wondering why I placed it so highly on my year-end list. Mostly, it's the fact that, in between the record's moments of confusion and mistakes, Thom Yorke sometimes achieves gorgeousness. For example, the track "Analyse" showcases a soft, resigned piano line driven along by a stuttering drum beat, over which Thom Yorke intones "there's no time to analyse/ to think things through/ to make sense."


Thom Yorke - "Analyse"; live (???)
The dichotomy of Thom Yorke's desire to pause his life and the inevitable progression of time is paralleled by the clash between lethargic piano and insistent rhythm. "And It Rained All Night", a pulsating monster that comes in later on in the album, achieves a sort of ethereal beauty which can only fully appreciated when driving down an empty street at two in the morning. Yorke even manages to showcase some of his best lyrics in "Harrowdown Hill", in spite of his lap-dog clunkers:

Don't walk the plank like I did:
you will be dispensed with
when you've become inconvenient.
In the harrowdown hill,
where you went to school:
that's where I am.
That's where I'm lying down.

To many, The Eraser will serve as little more than an apertif for the full-band effort due sometime later this year. To others, it may be altogether ignored. As a gigantic Radiohead fan, I might be slightly biased, but I found the record's few transcendent moments significant enough to justify its low points. A record filled with these songs would undoubtedly have been nominated as my favorite record of the year. In any case, I know I won't be forgetting The Eraser's better moments any time soon.