Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 25/08/08
Label: Wichita

A spoiler for illegal downloaders? Attention-seeking ploy? Whatever commercial motives drove Bloc Party to rush-release their new album in the space of a week, enough time has now passed to reflect on "Intimacy"'s musical merits. The initial feeling may be, you feel, that the band have hurried the writing and recording of their third full-length.

To begin with, "Intimacy" certainly seems to pick-up where sophomore effort "A Weekend In The City" left off last February - tracks like "Halo" prickle with a maximal drive that came to replace the sparse sound of debut "Silent Alarm". The shadowy spaces of "Positive Tension" and "Banquet" seem fairly distant now, blown away with the Gang Of Four comparisons of old as soon as opener "Ares" screeches into earshot, Russell Lissack's guitar closer to the bombast of late '90s dance acts like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. Recent single "Mercury", despite a new reliance on tape loops and synthetic brass, is one of a number of tracks that could easily have slotted into the ranks of "A Weekend in the City".

So is the record really a collection of that album's cast-offs? Not quite. There's been a shift of sorts, though it's more perceptible in Kele Okereke's lyrics than the increasingly cluttered noise conjured by his comrades. While previously Okereke's musings seemed to grasp clumsily toward the political, here they're markedly more personal - unsurprising given the frontman recently revealed a break-up fuelled "Intimacy"'s rapid recording.

Though the album's first words (in the aforementioned "Ares") are "War, war, war, war", Okereke goes on to spell out a more personal struggle than the one alluded to in, say, "Hunting For Witches"; the 'war on terror' lost in a head-spin of guitar and riotous drumming, the narrator instead focusing on battles conducted in the "first-person singular". The combative opener seems to mirror the arrogance that often replaces quiet confidence at a relationship's death and of the ten tracks here there are only three you could describe as "tender" or "yearning".

Even then - as in the immaculate "Better Than Heaven" - Okereke is as loathe to mope as the band behind him. While many who fell for the tight restraint of "Silent Alarm" may have felt disenfranchised with the follow-up, here Bloc Party deal in a different kind of restraint - a break-up album could have been one hysterical wailing bitch of a record, but instead Okereke should be commended for ensuring the fire burning in his balls is transmitted to tape. Rushed it may have been, but here Bloc Party seem to accurately reflect post-relationship blues: confused, introspective and stung.

    by Kev Kharas