From the ACL Taping Program on September 17, 2007:
Not many bands portray their music as “living noise,” but British indie-rock band Bloc Party says that’s exactly what they play. With their jerky guitar pop, irresistible hooks and big ideas, Bloc Party has been compared to such cult icons as Sonic Youth and The Pixies.Released in 2005, the band’s first album Silent Alarm hit record stores with a bang, with Billboard calling it “one of the best debuts of 2005” and Entertainment Weekly tagged it as a “post-punk mishmash of angular guitars, pulsating bass, and tricky time signatures.” The Village Voice wrote “Bloc Party borrow the soaring melodic guitar lines of Television and sinuous noodling of New Order and the Cure to add a lushness that makes these songs sonically beautiful as well as rhythmically aggressive.”
The band’s lead singer Kele Okereke, however, wanted to get away from all the media hype about the album. “With this record I really wanted it to have more varied textures and just make something that was really representative of what we were listening to as a band, which wasn’t the typical Wire-y post punk thing that everyone assumed about us when we first came onto the scene,” said Okereke.
Bloc Party’s much-anticipated second album, A Weekend in the City, debuted in February 2007. The band said the new release is “the living noise of a metropolis … daily life in a modern city, and the quiet desolation that suffuses everything from commuting to casual sex, from going out on a Friday night to the long ride home in the early hours of the morning.”
Lost at Sea wrote, “A Weekend in the City showcases what all the band's initial buzz was about, but twists and filters what might have been expected, leaving them open to praise for different reasons.”
