Several weeks ago, in some impoverished corner of the globe, a kid caught a ride to the big city and the world changed forever. In early 2007, a tipping point was reached: for the first time in history in excess of 50 per cent of humanity now dwells in urban areas. Stretched ahead of us, paved in plexiglass and grime, suffused in smog, the metropolitan century awaits.
Cities are the humming carburettors of progress, of course – what has the countryside done for anyone lately? – but even the great conurbations of the age have the capacity to overpower and alienate. Clearly, all of this weighs heavily upon Kelé Okereke, who, on Bloc Party’s second album, A Weekend In The City , spins a grainy tone-poem of concrete angst, a rumination on suburban disaffection set amidst the tower-blocks and the flyovers .
Musically, Bloc Party have embraced the processed beat and the treated guitar; producer Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee quilts A Weekend In The City in a icy, teutonic ambience. Had Bloc Party recorded the single, ‘The Prayer’, two years ago, for instance, it would probably have surfed a ripe tide of indie jangles. Steeped in Lee’s Kraftwerk-go-pop production, though, the song avoids your gaze, refuses to plug into the grid.
When they broke in 2005, Bloc Party charted a course between new-wave pastiche and art-school naïveté. Silent Alarm, their debut, found Okereke channelling Sylvia Plath and Ian Curtis – what was remarkable is that he did so without coming off as callow and pretentious.
Weirdly, A Weekend In The City (recorded, with towering irony in rural Westmeath) is both less oblique and more understated; initially the album proves harder work than its predecessor – at the same time it's more open about what it has to say.
Not that Bloc Party have entirely renounced Silent Alarm’s post-punk kicks; ‘Hunting For Witches’ opens in a torrent of white noise before sinking, trance-like into a lithe melody and a clipped beat; freighted with chiming chords ‘I Still Remember’ waxes epic, then pauses to dab its eyes.
Over the closing one-two of ‘Sunday’ and ‘SXRT’, meanwhile, the band invest in slow, sweeping washes of sound – at moments the music turns so ethereal it’s a wonder it doesn’t dissolve completely.
Following the retro buzz of Silent Alarm, nobody knew what Bloc Party would do next, themselves least of all perhaps. Now we have our answer: they’ve lowered the temperature, raised the tempo, produced an album of unflinching depth and maturity.