Bloc Party: Trying To Be Heroic

Who cares about internet leaks, sophomore slumps and strange tourmates? BLOC PARTY are doing their best to make it through the travails of their generation.

Story: Dan LeRoy

Photos: LeAnn Mueller

Kele Okereke is in the midst of a passionate rant about his band’s new album, but not a word he says is audible. The frontman of Bloc Party is walking home from Sunday dinner, and he’s being drowned out by the noises of the London streets. Trucks, taxis, shoppers and shouters-as well as some transatlantic static-are all working against Okereke. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate backdrop for a discussion of A Weekend In The City, however. When Okereke moans, “East London is a vampire” on the disc’s leadoff track, it’s only the opening stare of a cold, hard look at the metropolis and its discontents.

Anyone who was expecting a sophomore set in the vein of 2005’s Silent Alarm-which won a truckload of critical raves-should probably jump off the bandwagon now. Much of the tightly-wound punk-funk and shout-along choruses of their debut are gone, replaced by something a bit like one of Bret Easton Ellis’s jaded youth novels set to Timbaland’s electro-symphonies. The first track, “Song For Clay (Disappear Here),” is, in fact, dedicated to the soulless narrator of Ellis’s seminal work, the 1985 book Less Than Zero. For the entirety of Okereke’s bleak weekend in the city, he explores the detachment of modern life, turning Ellis’s burned-out Los Angeles kids into swinging London sophisticates “who are only concerned with where the next party is, or who they’re fucking next.”

“Ellis’s characters have this emotional numbness. They’re partaking of the world, but there really isn’t any enjoyment or satisfaction,” explains Okereke, who has reached the much quieter confines of his London flat. “Everything just becomes a meaningless charade. And I think that’s certainly apparent in the record. People feeling dissatisfied with what life has amounted to… But not really being able to break out of the routine.

“It really is quite a dark record, I feel.”

But then, A Weekend In The City comes at the close of a dark-or at least, turbulent-period for Bloc Party. Last fall, the group had to abort a controversial U.S. tour with Panic! At The Disco after drummer Matt Tong suffered a collapsed lung. Back home in London, they watched helplessly as a rough version of Weekend was leaked onto the internet, bloggers pontificating about the still-unreleased disc well before Christmas. Some of those reviews, as Okereke expected, expressed disappointment at the more introspective sound of the album.

What makes Okereke such an intriguing frontman is his mixture of shyness and pugnaciousness; the latter takes over as he discusses the early internet disses of Weekend. “I’m not really at all concerned about maintaining a fanbase. It’s not really about writing songs because other people like them,” he insists. “It’s about writing songs because I like them. To me, if we were to have written an identical record to Silent Alarm, it would be patronizing our audience. I’ve got every faith that people will come to believe this is a better record than Silent Alarm. Because it is a better record than Silent Alarm. It has more depth, the songs are better, it sounds better.

“I think it’s incredibly important: If people think we’re this sort of band that can only make these fast, shouty, vaguely angsty songs, then they shouldn’t be on with us, really, because that’s only a facet of what we do,” he adds defiantly. “They can just buy records by the next band instead.”

Even though the two bands played only three shows together, Bloc Party’s micro-stint on last fall’s Panic! tour was an early warning to anyone who thought they had the band figured out. The group that roared out of the U.K. in early 2005 with the rousing singles “Banquet” and “Helicopter” seemed to have more in common with venerable countrymen like the Clash and Gang Of Four than just danceable punk. Few critics failed to attach a political connotation to the band’s lyrics (“Stop being so American”) or even the Eastern European spelling of “bloc.”

So what were Okereke, Tong, guitarist Russell Lissack and bassist Gordon Moakes doing opening for the group some view as emo’s leading boy band?

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