Bloc Party Get Intimate

Gigs sometimes bleed into one another, a vague blur with nothing special about them, but not for Bloc Party.

When the band played the Toronto Virgin Festival in support of their recently released third album, Intimacy, on Saturday, they had only just begun playing the disc's songs live — which frontman Kele Okereke finds a bit scary.

"While we were rehearsing, I felt really worried," Okereke says while sitting in the lobby of a Toronto hotel. "We were quite under-rehearsed.

"We played some songs for the first time yesterday and it felt really, really good. Now we've got that under our belts, I think we're going to be more adventurous with how many songs we play in sets and stuff. It's really, really great we're doing this kind of more intimate kind of tour of Canada, with smaller arenas and students. It's going to be fun and we can laugh and if you make mistakes, you make mistakes. It's OK."

Not long after A Weekend In The City was released last year, the band went back into the studio with Paul Epworth, who produced their Silent Alarm debut, and recorded eight songs they'd previously written. Subsequent sessions with Jacknife Lee, who worked on A Weekend In The City, yielded more songs written in the studio.

The result was Intimacy, an album that's much different from anything Bloc Party have previously recorded. It was made available for digital download last month and will hit stores as a physical release on Oct. 28. It features pre-recorded drum beats and more electronic elements — adventurous territory for a band whose first album was straight-forward, danceable indie rock.

Instead of writing about concepts like the "war on terror," racism and the world after 9/11, which marked A Weekend In The City, Okereke says he only wrote the songs that would eventually become Intimacy when he was "feeling emotionally charged," which made the album a "record about falling in and out of love.

"With A Weekend In The City, its concept preceded the record and people just thought it was this really big statement about the world, which it kind of was in a way. But towards the end of touring, I just felt that sort of approach was quite heavy-handed and I hated it, actually. I really wish we hadn't done it. Even though I'm proud of the record in the same way I hated Silent afterwards, there's so much about it we could have done better.

"That's probably because my creative impulse is to dismiss things as soon as you're done. That's why you write another record."

While some will be surprised at the sound change on Intimacy, it's a natural progression for Okereke. He says while the band wanted to make the record different from Silent Alarm and A Weekend In The City, they didn't set out to purposely record an electronic album, which would have been contrived. And while the change in direction has elicited both positive and negative reactions, Okereke says he isn't really concerned about what people think.

"We're always going to be making records that zip around and do the unexpected. That's always going to be how we get excitement from making records. If people don't like it, they're going to have to lump it because we're not going to change... There's no point in nostalgia and there's no point in looking to the past. It's all about the future for us."

Here are Bloc Party's Canadian dates:

Sept. 9 Edmonton, AB @ Edmonton Event Centre
Sept 10 Calgary, AB @ MacEwan Hall
Sept. 12 Quebec City, QC @ Envol Et Macadam Festival
Sept. 13 Fredericton, NB @ Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival
Sept. 14-15 Halifax, NS @ The Marquee Club
Sept. 17 Montreal, QC @ Metropolis