Bloc Party — Intimacy

I recently realized (finally) that I quite like Bloc Party's A Weekend In The City. I was a huge Silent Alarm fan, and when its follow-up came out, I considered it to be a moderately clunky, though sometimes magnetic, sophomore effort.

After I played the hastily released Intimacy once the whole way through, I didn't want to turn it on again for another three days. I was pretty sure it was terrible. Repeat listens over the last couple of days have confirmed my suspicions.

The biggest issue is frontman Kele Okereke. The record's lyrics focus on an actual relationship and recent break-up and they aren't honest or endearing. They're catastrophically and embarrassingly confessional. And when they aren't that, they make little to no sense. Maybe this would be excusable — like most of Nine Inch Nails' recorded output — if the ambitious, experimental tracks exceeded the frontman's horrific misstep. But most of them are middling at best, grating at worst.

Here's a track by track take with the lowlights:

"Ares"
Okereke recasts himself as M.I.A. headlining a frat party. His annoyingly chirpy scat rap over a recycled Chemical Brothers beat is the unpromising harbinger of bad things to come.

"Mercury"
"Bleeding gums and v-veins protruding/You're starting to hate all of your clothes/Neumayrs in L.A. and she ain't returning/I'm sleeping with people I don't even like." The nonsense truly begins on the album's first single, a track so schizophrenic it makes Aphex Twin sound like The Rolling Stones. From the vocal splicing to the awful horns, I can't believe this is the same band who wrote "Helicopter."

"Halo"
"Paralyse me with your kiss/Wipe those dirty hands on me/Maybe we're looking for the same thing/Maybe you're the one who'll complete me." That band does reappears on track three, but the power chord that drives it is startlingly unimaginative. Worse, Okereke's vocals are needlessly fed through Auto-Tune during the verses. Also, isn't "you complete me" only supposed to be used ironically now?

"Biko"
"Was my love not strong enough/To bring you back from the death/If I could eat your cancer, I will/But I can't." The record's first true lyrical crime actually comes on one of its better songs, and a slower one to boot. But, again, Okereke's saccharine writing drains all the credibility out of it.

"Trojan Horse"
"You used to take your watch off before we made love/You didn't want to share our time with anyone." This track is actually filled with so many terrible lines it could be the basis of a book on how to not write lyrics. The music, though, is passable even if it sounds like a Silent Alarm castoff, and it's loud enough to overshadow what Okereke is singing. I can just picture producers Jacknife Lee and Paul Epworth pushing the guitars and ambience up and the vocals down in the production booth at the rest of the group's behest.

"Signs"
By the time we get here, it's starting to get obvious that all of Bloc Party's slower songs sound almost exactly the same. This one is interchangeable with at least one other from Intimacy and a couple from AWITC.

"One Month Off"
"I can be as cruel as you, fighting fire with firewood/I can be as cruel as you, fighting lies with lies." This is the song where Okereke's full break-up rage comes out, and that's the best he can do for a chorus. The song centres around a chunky riff that wouldn't sound out of place on a 30 Seconds To Mars album. I think it was here that I realized this album caters exclusively to kids 14 to 18 years old.

"Zephyrus"
"And your face is still wet from the night before/As your tears hit the ground, blue flowers spring from them." Bloc Party officially jump the shark right then and there. Sorry guys, it's over. There's also a terrible over-the-top choir on this one.

"Better Than Heaven"
I don't have much to say about this MOR pop tune, so it seems like a good time to mention that most of the drum tracks on the album are computer-programmed. This seems like a massive waste when you consider Matt Tong is one of the best drummers in rock.

"Ion Square"
"Who said unbroken happiness/Is a bore, is a bore?/Who said it, my love? I don't mind it/Anymore, anymore." Much like this line, I find Intimacy difficult to comprehend. There are signs here and there that the band haven't lost their ability to excite their fans, but those moments are few and far between. Can they come back from this? Probably. But consider this: If this was Bloc Party's first album and not its third, would we have ever heard about them in the first place?