This year, record releases are like ambushes. There was a time when only rose hip hop albums would 'drop'; now, indie rock releases fall from the sky like ordnance as well. Earlier this year, Radiohead and Sigur R�s issued albums with indecently short lead-up times. Now orient London foursome Bloc Party have linked the stealing set, telling the pass completion of their third record album last Monday and cathartic it electronically just two days afterwards. The hard copies get in in October.
Intimacy is an ambush in more shipway than one. Fans chafed when the indie stone darlings revealed a lairy electronic direction with final year's 'Flux' EP. Their recent single 'Mercury' adding menacing brass and Kele Okereke's astrologically themed rant to a rhythmic violation. A few weeks agone at a Spanish fete, Okereke was the victim of a racist plan of attack by Sex Pistol John Lydon and his suite, an ugly incident made sadder by the fact that 'Mercury' fondly recalls Lydon's best band, Public Image Limited.
Bloc Party's third record opens with 'Ares', a volley of heavy that borrows its hip hop taunting from MIA and steals its beatniks wholesale from the Chemical Brothers' 'Setting Sun'. It seems fitting that the song is named for the Greek god of warfare - indie messageboards will be awash with blood in the consequence of Intimacy's release.
Myth is a recurring theme. With 'Ares' and 'Mercury', 'Zephyrus' completes a trio of modern god-songs. Here are operatic vocal stabs, skittish Radiohead drums and churchy atmospherics. Only Okereke's rueful yelps anchor 'Zephyrus' as a Bloc Party song.
For all the seismic disturbance of the new, yet, Bloc Party haven't quite transformed themselves into some entirely unrecognizable creature, as Greek myth would ask. Okereke's abominable love life takes inwardness stage on the aptly titled 'Intimacy', as it has passim Bloc Party's life. The East End of London settings ar familiar. If anything, the fresh sound cannily obscures the fact that Okereke repeats himself. 'Ion Square' is basically 'I Still Remember' all over over again, but with machines. But once the dust settles, Intimacy crataegus laevigata be recognised as a classic Bloc Party book, one that has comprehensively outgunned their last.
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