Bloc Party – A Weekend In The City

Band Members
Kele Okereke - Guitar, Vocals
Russell Lissack - Guitar
Gordon Moakes - Bass
Matt Tong - Drums



Tracklisting
1. Song For Clay (Disappear Here)
2. Hunting For Witches
3. Waiting For The 7.18
4. The Prayer
5. Uniform
6. On
7. Where Is Home?
8. Kreuzberg
9. I Still Remember
10. Sunday
11. SRXT

BlocParty.com
Myspace.com/BlocParty


So, Bloc Party return with their "state of the nation" album, an insight into the social issues of East London. The album starts with Kele Okereke’s falsetto singing in 'Song for Clay (Disappear Here)', which opens out into a full-on rock song, with one of the best Bloc riffs since Helicopter. Inspired by the novel “Less Than Zero” by Bret Easton Ellis, the track is worthy of opening any album, and is followed up by 'Hunting for Witches', a slice of Banquet-esque brilliance, written about the 7/7 London bombings that occurred not far from Okereke’s home.

After this, the album begins to slowly decline in quality, with the particular low being 'Where Is Home?', which, no doubt, has a lot of feeling behind the lyrics, but, as with elsewhere on the album, they seem very forced, like they don’t actually fit to the music. The album gets another highlight with 'I Still Remember' and finishes well but the overall feel is one of slight disappointment, although this is mainly due to the fact that it follows their amazing debut, Silent Alarm.
It was always going to be tricky to follow such a great album, but the combination of Moakes and Tong on bass and drums was much more prominent on Silent Alarm, and more of that brilliance might have been used on A Weekend in the City.

Overall this album is still very good, but fails to live up to Silent Alarm, and gives an air of trying-too-hard.

7 / 10


Review by Rory Walker


<- Back