Bloc Party : Dance Like Everyone is Watching

Intimacy issues

Dance-rockers Bloc Party get confrontational

Published October 16, 2008 by Christine Leonard

Creating dance music that can’t be danced to is a totally counterintuitive idea. Yet, as strange as it seems, it is a working formula for Britain’s Bloc Party. Equipped with a distinctive sound that incorporates elements of indie rock, pop, ’80s new wave and ’90s electronica, the London-based quartet has worked hard to carve a niche for themselves in Europe and North America. Cultivating a style built on heartsick lyrics and heavenly guitar runs, Bloc Party’s efforts led to their debut album, Silent Alarm, which broke on BBC Radio in 2005 and was soon certified platinum on the U.K. charts. Garnering comparisons to bands such as The Cure, Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins and Joy Division, Silent Alarm was voted the year’s best album by leading Brit music mag New Musical Express. Perhaps more significantly, the album also featured the track “Helicopter,” which was used in the movie Grandma’s Boy and appears on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Guitar Hero: On Tour.

Propelled into the international spotlight by the unprecedented success of “Helicopters,” Bloc Party began to lay the groundwork for their second album, A Weekend in the City. Upping the ante with the addition of electronic samples and multiple overdubs, singer-guitarist Kele Okereke, guitarist Russell Lissack, bassist Gordon Moakes and drummer Matt Tong turned to producer Garret “Jackknife” Lee in order to perfect their old-meets-new aesthetic. Their collaboration paid off big time. The album’s first single, “The Prayer,” became the band’s highest-charting single, confirming both the appeal of their ’80s-inspired sound and their staying power as a group.

“Some people might think of our style as being nostalgic, but really we’re just looking for what’s strongest in a given type of music,” says Moakes. “While we are conscious of the music we grew up on, it seems backwards to try to re-create it. There were really only a handful of acts that I could really stand — that whole retro-Beatles thing is boring to us.”

Aiming to entertain themselves as well as their audience, Bloc Party has continued to add new instruments and skill sets to their ever-expanding repertoire. Pushing themselves to new limits on their recently released third album, Intimacy, Moakes and company dug deep to write material that challenges them even as it reaches back to the raw, unguarded innocence of their earlier compositions.

“If our first album was a pastel and our second album was a black-and-white, then this new album is definitely neon,” Moakes says.

“In the past, we’ve battled with our ideas by piling them on top of one another. It muddied the waters. People thought it signaled that we were a band that wasn’t necessarily interested in guitars. And, in fact, that was the case. With Intimacy, we set out to do something more vibrant, immediate, confrontational and visceral. The whole record was a challenge; we tried to keep it simple…. It’s made me a much better musician.”