Bloc Party "Silent Alarm"
This album has been out since March 2005, and I should have been listening to it since then. Silent Alarm is one of the top 10 albums of 2005!!! I haven't yet turned it off since I got it. And usually I burn myself out on a band really quickly (overplaying them). This is a band from the UK who are unlike anything I have heard in awhile. I can not yet dissect where their musical sound comes from but it's somewhere in between Radiohead, the Cure, U2, the Clash, Franz, Blur, and the Police. Lyrically and vocally I'm not sure who this singer sounds like. He sounds like a snobby white British teenager (but not a John Lydon). But suprisingly he's the one black guy in the band. The band is a mix of an asian guy, a black guy, and two white guys ((Kele Okereke (vocals, guitar); Russel Lissack (guitar); Gordon Moakes (bass guitar); Matt Tong (drums)). The music is diverse. But it doesn't seem to draw from before the late 80's musically. Bloc Party has ate the best music from the 80's and 90's and coughed it back up in a new millenium form. The "who's-who" of British Indie rock. They sound both retro and highly modern all over the place. Very cool. Very upbeat. Fast. Unpredictable. Nice harmonies. Pretty slow songs. Distorted quick psychedelic uptempo songs. If a band is only as good as their drummer, this band is GOOD. Non-stop breakbeat and uptempo drumming leads the way for angular radiohead type guitar, followed by a typical proto-reggae upstroke popular with today's garage rock bands (or "grit rock" as my bud jf says). As their 1st and only album (they did allow a techno remix album by other artists) this one kicks ass! They said that they love the electronic music scene so they let dj's remix this album. But it's SOOOOO techno! And techno is the least creative of electronic music in my mind. Tell that to most of the rest of the world though (techno is huge everywhere but the US). But I like their ideas. They should have gotten Amon Tobin, DJ Shadow, Automator, Squarepusher, Prefuse 73, DJ Spooky, and the likes, to remix it though. A truly original band. Whoever they are influenced by, they break it up enough where it's all theirs' now. One lyric has been stuck in my head since I first deciphered it, "I drink myself by eating glass". As an artist myself, this lines speaks to me for some reason. Think about it. There's 14 songs on the album and so far I really like about 12 of them so I highly recommend this album to anyone who likes rock from the last 10 years. 5 out of 5 thumbs.