FEATURE:
Banquet
Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm at Twenty
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PRODUCED by…
Bloc Party and Paul Epworth, one of the finest debut albums of the 2000s (first decade of the twenty-first century) turns twenty on 2nd February. Silent Alarm is the amazing introduction of the London band. Recorded in Copenhagen and London, the album reached number three in the U.K. Many know the album for singles such as Banquet and Helicopter, though the album is packed full of classics. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for Silent Alarm. There are a couple of features that I want to start out with. In 2018, Vibe Music wrote why Bloc Party’s debut album is the most important of its generation:
“Culturally, the world was in a weird position. We had only seen a small percentage of how big a dickhead Kanye West would become. Simon Cowell was at the peak of his stranglehold over the world with his assembly line of reality TV wannabes. And the country had somehow gone mad when ‘crazy frog’ sold by the bucket load. In terms of the indie rock scene, however, everything was rosy. The glut of drab, lifeless weepy rock bands that got big in the wake of Britpop were slowly fading thanks to the likes of the Strokes, Franz Ferdinand and the Libertines, with the likes of Kasabian and Arctic Monkeys ready to take up the mantle. But amidst all of these great acts, Bloc Party arrived to drop an album that would stand as a snapshot of its era. Audibly and aesthetically, Silent Alarm is as identifiably a part of its era as Franz Ferdinand’s and Arctic Monkeys classic albums. The spiky guitars, yelping vocals and tight rhythms can be found in a myriad of bands around at the time. But while it’s revered by critics and Bloc Party’s diehard fans, Silent Alarm isn’t as revered or lionised as its contemporaries. Which is a shame, because this album is probably the only album of its time that is just as important and relevant today as it was when it was first released.
While all those bands I mentioned wrote great songs that still get a reaction whenever you hear them on a night out, they’re not songs that tick with you and make you think. It took Pete and Carl wanting to kill each other that caused them to write songs as complex as ‘Music When the Lights Go Out’. Franz Ferdinand aimed to dominate dancefloors and Kasabian the terraces, while Alex Turner hadn’t fully matured as a songwriter yet. Bloc Party’s frontman and lyricist Kele Okereke, however, was writing about a wider palette of themes and topics. How many other bands of the time can you think of that could score a hit song like ‘Helicopter’, with lyrics focusing on Bush’s foreign policy? Or, in ‘Price of Gasoline’, the general public’s ignorance of the hypocrisies of the Iraq war? Okereke aimed to make music that made the listener think as much as dance.
In our current era of pleasant and happy-to-be-here bands afraid to express an opinion less they offend anyone, it’s inspiring to hear a band speak with conviction on issues that they’re genuinely angry and passionate about. In fact, looking at the mess that the world finds itself in today, it would be interesting to see what an up-and-coming Bloc Party could create if they were getting started today. And in an era defined by the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, Bloc Party stood apart from the very white ‘boys club’ of indie rock music. With a drummer of Chinese origin, and a singer both black and gay, they score high on the minority bingo. The Bloc Party of 2005 were as progressive then as they would be today.
This abrasive and upfront attitude is reflected as much in the music as it is in the lyrics. If there’s one word that can describe the sound of Silent Alarm, it’s tense. This is an album that sounds like it’s about to split apart at the seams at any minute. No guitarist at the time could sound as sharp as a knife like Russell Lissack did. Matt Tong and Gordon Moakes’ tight rhythms held the songs together whilst propelling them forward with an uncontrollable urgency, while Okereke’s vocals scream and howl like he’s trying to reach through the speakers, grab you by the shoulders and start ranting and raving in your face.
But Silent Alarm works as much on a personal level as it does on an intellectual. Much of the album focuses on themes and subjects you wouldn’t find in many indie bands catalogues. Songs about depression, loneliness, mental illness and addiction don’t exactly make for great singalongs. But Silent Alarm is one of the most deeply layered and thoughtful album of its time. Contextually, the album and band it can be compared to most is Joy Division and Ian Curits’ lyrics. Think about it; ‘She’s Hearing Voices’ is a spiritual successor to ‘She’s Lost Control’, Okereke’s unsettling words about how “she just can’t sleep” and “she’s falling down the stairs, she’s tearing out her hair” mirroring Ian Curtis remarking on how “She’s Lost Control again”. The lyrics of ‘Like Eating Glass’ centre on loneliness and feeling cut off from everyone, the subject of the song comparing his isolation to something torturous: “Like drinking poison, like eating glass”. It’s not hard to compare this to Curtis’ feelings of anxiety and self-doubt in ‘Isolation’.
Throughout Silent Alarm, Okereke touches on feelings of loneliness and panic in a way that none of his contemporaries could, with listeners able to relate to and take comfort in songs that reflect their difficult situations, and while it’s arguable that Bloc Party would write individual songs that reflect on these issues better later on (‘I Still Remember’ and ‘Flux’ being perfect examples), Silent Alarm is their only album in which these songs coalesce with the bands other themes and ideas to create a cohesive whole. It’s an album that affects your heart as much as your head, and stands as a piece of art that can challenge your ideas about the world and yourself.
In the end, the tragedy of Bloc Party is that for a band that felt so special when they first arrived, they eventually fell into the same clichés as many other bands have before; diminishing returns, members exiting, a frontman more concerned with his solo career. For how much they stood out at the time, Bloc Party’s career followed the likes of Franz Ferdinand and the Strokes: brilliant, game changing first album; second album that sold more but wasn’t as good; third album that’s just plain crap; and subsequent music that’s good but nothing special. Following Silent Alarm, A Weekend in the City was good, but couldn’t match its predecessor. When I first heard third album Intimacy I thought it was one of the worst albums I’d ever heard, and was the point where the band completely lost their momentum. Four had one perfect song in ‘V.A.L.I.S’ but nothing else was memorable, and by the time of their latest album, HYMNS, there were only two original band members left, and they sounded like they’d completely stopped giving a shit. Okereke’s solo work had begun influencing the direction of the band, and his lyrics suffered due to it. Seriously, how did a guy who once wrote a line as simultaneously bizarre and intimate as “you told me you wanted to eat up my sadness, well jump on, enjoy, you can gorge away”, end up writing something as cringe worthy as “tell your bitch to get off my shit, smoking on that home-grown”?
While there following work has done a lot to dent Bloc Party’s reputation, particularly Intimacy (honestly – fuck that album), the power of Silent Alarm remains as potent as it did the first time the world heard it. While their sound and aesthetic has influenced bands like Foals and The Maccabees, none of them have come close to creating something as profound as Silent Alarm: not even Bloc Party themselves. And while the world seems as chaotic and confusing as it was in 2005, it’s inspiring to know that there’s an album that can force you to confront the problems within the world, and can make you reflect on the feelings and insecurities in your own life”.
In 2015, Interns looked at Silent Alarm ten years on from its release. I think that it is still one of the most important debut albums of the past twenty years. Ahead of its twentieth anniversary, I think it is important to explore this incredible album. One that continues to receive so much love and attention to this day. It is a stunningly confident debut from a band who are still going today:
“In the ten years since Bloc Party released their iconic debut album Silent Alarm, there’s been much discussion about how indie bands fit into the music scene. Guitar music has been declared dead and then reborn a number of times, but the truth is most of the bands that occupied that spectrum of music in 2005 have since died or faded. Bloc Party’s fourth album, released in 2012, failed to excite like their past releases and their lead singer Kele Okereke has turned predominantly to electronic music.
In 2005, twee was popular. It was cool to be British, it was cool to play a high-slung guitar and it was cool to have ironic, lengthy song titles. Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, Elbow and Maximo Park thrived while the Arctic Monkeys were arriving as the coolest nerds on the planet. Of course now, Alex Turner is a high-quiffed rock god and the Arctic Monkeys have shed nearly any signs of indie tweeness that they ever had in favour of a confident, stadium-ready sound. In comparison, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs and Maximo Park have fallen far from their perch at the top of the Alternative rock pyramid of 2005.
At this point it’s uncertain whether we will ever hear a new Bloc Party album again. Kele has just released his sophomore record Doubt and also ruled out any possibility of a Silent Alarm anniversary tour. But 10 years ago, Silent Alarm had Bloc Party pegged as the greatest indie-rock band around at that time. Pitchfork and NME both agreed (a rare conclusion) that Silent Alarm was brilliant with the latter awarding it the title of the best album of 2005. For context’s sake, Franz Ferdinand, Arcade Fire, The White Stripes and Kaiser Chiefs also featured on that list.
The indie band was flourishing. Myspace was a thing and the song you chose to play on your myspace page was just as important as a perfectly-angled profile picture. You couldn’t just choose a pop song, you had to select a song by an artist that people would think you were cool for having known or thank you for introducing them. Bloc Party fit that brief perfectly. Silent Alarm was explicitly melodic enough to please people on the surface and deep enough for music snobs to pick apart delightedly.
Let’s not sell Silent Alarm short, however. It wasn’t just an album for people’s mySpace page. It was much more than that. It was an album that stood out in a year when the music industry was flooded with indie-rock albums. It was a confident debut that was aware of what it had to do in order to impress. It was emotional, daring, expansive and colourful. As far as Okereke was concerned, every song had to sound like a single. Every song had to hit you as hard on the first listen as on the twentieth. As Pitchfork pointed out at the time, Bloc Party’s biggest strength and weakness was that they “are like one of those people who are so well-groomed that it's hard to remember exactly what they look like.”
At the time I could measure how great a guitar-band’s melody was by how many people sung along to it when they track started. Still today if Silent Alarm is played for a room of people they will at least murmur the riffs of Banquet and Helicopter. The riffs were just as important as vocal hooks were and acted as a temptation to draw you into the songs within the first few seconds. Listen to the first few chords of This Modern Love and your heart immediately jumps into your throat.
When the album came out NME said that it was “time for anti-heroes”. Nowadays it’s almost more likeable to be a 'freak' than to be cool, as Lady Gaga has worked so hard to champion, but back then it was very almost unheard of for a band to be so different and yet be so cool. Oasis were cool because they were abrasive rockstars. The Libertines were appealing because they were anarchic. Coldplay fit in because they were creating stadium-rock that attached them to no type of person and as a consequence made them appealing to every type of person. NME writes, “Bloc Party are to be believed in because they are a band for the whites, the blacks, the straights, the hip-hop kids, the freaks, the geeks, the emo kids, the punk-funkers, the queers and, yes, the fashionistas.”
Silent Alarm dealt with themes of sleep deprivation, consumption and love. It’s never derogatory nor does it ever brag about bad behaviour. You won’t hear anything that would require them to shout it through a megaphone, instead they’re beautifully subtle. Okereke is gay but love was dealt with as love. None of the lyrics ever confine issues to a certain type of person. Rather the songs are about the universally differing emotions of human-beings. Those that don’t suit just one type of person. As such Silent Alarm was an album for all those people that NME listed and more. Albums that manage to do that transcend genres. You didn’t need to be a fan of indie rock to appreciate Silent Alarm. This is still a quality that drawers us to albums today. As an example, Caribou’s Our Love and Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There from last year also succeeded because they dealt with love and life in a way that was both personal and universal.
It should be kept in mind that Okereke was a gay, black man operating in an indie rock world mostly dominated by white men who made their appreciation of good-looking women almost suspiciously explicit. Not that Silent Alarm needs that kind of sentiment attached to it because it’s lyrical content was so far above being petty.
Some of the above makes out that Bloc Party weren’t incredibly cool. That’s not my intention. Bloc Party were cool. They operated in a time when hype bands had to be cool. They were well-dressed, guitar-thrashing Brits who sung about sex. But they did so in their own way. There were never stories of the band stumbling out of clubs with Kate Moss nor did they try to dress with the same rock swagger or cite The Smiths as a lifelong reference when it was in vogue to do so. Okereke admitted to Uncut that he’s only been a Smiths fan for a short time. Most people are in the same boat, but rarely do they admit it. Apparently everyone owns an original copy of The Smiths on vinyl. The point is, Bloc Party were cool on their own terms. Okereke even told Pitchfork in 2006, “I feel that's important that I have some place to go that isn't on the cover of a magazine. I signed up to make music. That's it.”
The final point to make about Bloc Party is that Silent Alarm feels fresh. Every band was referencing bands from the past. The Strokes harked loosely back to The Ramones, then every band referenced The Strokes for ten years. Kaiser Chiefs drew influences from The Beatles and The Clash. Franz Ferdinand cited ‘80s artists Orange Juice and Josef K. Silent Alarm never felt as if the band were looking back for inspiration. There was definitely signs of inspiration from the current British indie-rock scene of the time, but if there were any influences they were modern. In the same interview with Pitchfork, Okereke said, “There's too much rock that relies a fetishism or nostalgia for the old ways. That's a real enemy to music. It needs to be constantly looking forward”.
Let’s finish off with a couple of reviews for Silent Alarm. Pitchfork noted how Bloc Party built on the success of earlier singles and E.P.s, drawing from the darker end of the Indie Pop spectrum of the 1980s. They celebrated the “record's charismatic sophistication and outstanding songwriting that emphasizes substance-over-style”. It is an interesting review from an American publication. Getting to grips with an exciting and ambitious British group who did make a dent in America in 2005. However, the biggest reception was from the U.K. and Europe:
“Lead single "Banquet" is wonderfully tight and energetic-- the same kind of spiffy half-dancing rock as Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" or Duran Duran's "Planet Earth". That's easy to pull off when you've got a drummer this good, and a bassist that locks in with him so neatly, whether it's for rock charge or disco hustle. That, in fact, has been Bloc Party's main selling point, apart from the whole Remarkably Competent thing: When the rhythm section stretches its limbs, they leap a good distance away from the straight-ahead eighth-note riffing of the others in this game. Filter in their timely post-punk moves, Bunnymen gestures, and pop ambitions, and you start to feel like this is what it might have been like to listen to the Police or XTC in the early 80s; the sound of a straight-up rock band just a shade more sophisticated, and a little more interested in rhythm, than most of their peers.
And of course the opener, "Like Eating Glass", is even grander and snappier than "Banquet", as if to promise from the start that these guys take your purchase seriously. The songwriting is simple in style (forward rhythm, tidy hooks, guitars) but smart in detail-- all stops and starts, bridges and breakdowns, firework flourishes and tasteful studio tweaks. Even more striking are the precision and sheer good taste of the performances: It's not so easy to show off within the confines of songs this focused, but these guys seem to manage just fine.
So you get all the usual scrubbed-up gifts: the slower song, the slower song that turns into a faster one, the one with the studio effects, the one with the handclaps. A lot of this material is surprisingly scripted, as if someone spent whole nights in the practice space trying to get a two-bar guitar transition to work Just So. Okerere has a voice that's weirdly similar to the singer from the long-forgotten Adorable, with whom Bloc Party share a hell of a lot more than an appreciation for the Bunnymen: It's a vaguely-strangled back-of-throat thing that lets him moan and shout with refreshing gusto when the band gets going. (Typically ambitious topics of moaning: other people, culture war, girls and society and stuff.) The voice weakens a bit when he needs to croon, but crooning isn't really the point here. Bloc Party can be pretty, even sappy, but they're never looking to be atmospheric; they can rock, but they're never looking to whip up dark drama. This album charges happily down the center-- it shakes its hips now and then, and it whispers here and there, but it always seems to come back to tight and bouncy.
People will love this record. And so, inevitably, the people who don't love it will start complaining. And when they complain, they'll point out that this is just a regular-old rock album, full of all the current stylish rock-album tricks. And they'll be absolutely right; at worst, Bloc Party are like one of those people who are so well-groomed that it's hard to remember exactly what they look like. But really, a complaint like that misses something: Being a good ol' unchallenging rock band is this outfit's whole point-- and their biggest strength”.
I am going to finish off with a review from NME. They awarded Silent Alarm 9 out of 10 when they sat down with it. For anyone – like I say in all album anniversary features – who has not heard Silent Alarm or knows much about Bloc Party, do go and seek out this incredible work:
“Recorded with Paul Epworth far away from their birthing pool in London’s New Cross (they originally came to NME’s attention on Angular Records’ legendary unsigned band compilation ‘ The New Cross’) in “polite, civilised and pretty” Copenhagen last year, ‘Silent Alarm’is no‘Franz Ferdinand’. In fact, listen to it with the words ‘popular’ and ‘arty’ in mind and its spirit is closer to the Manic Street Preachers’ ‘The Holy Bible’.
The themes of sex, boredom and consumption should be familiar to students of that haunting album. Just check the railing against America on the Bush -baiting ‘Helicopter’ (sample lyric: “Just like his dad, just like his dad (same mistakes)/Some things will never be different”). Or the military march-meets- Berlin Love Parade stomp of‘Price Of Gas’, the price of course being not 91.4p a litre but the corpses of thousands of innocent Iraqis (“I can tell you how this ends/We’re gonna win this – WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR!”).
Beyond politics, Kele and Gordon’s lyrics also take in sex (“I still feel you and the taste of cigarettes” – ‘Blue Light’), boredom and consumption (“The fear and the yearning/The fear and the consumption” –‘Positive Tension’) and loneliness/depression/paranoia in 21st-century Britain (the first lyric on the LP is “It’s so cold in this house”, for fuck’s sake).
But where they manage – yet again – to sneak out of a pigeonhole is that street preaching, manically or otherwise, is not for them. They’ve shied away from the sloganeering as they’ve got further into the public spotlight. Their official website has featured quotes from Bertrand Russell, nods to JG Ballard, and articles titled “What They Want Pop Stars To Be” and “Intellectualising Fleetwood Mac”. The album takes its name from a New Scientist article about an earthquake detection system in Japan, but the relevance to the band is obvious. ‘Silent Alarm’is an early-warning system, a wake-up call for seismic events to come, but not one that’s wielding a megaphone on a street corner.
Bloc Party are pretty slippery customers. Give them a ‘new Franz’ or ‘new Manics’ tag and ‘Silent Alarm’ will wriggle free in seconds. It’s an LP as committed to pigeonholes as Pete Doherty is to turning up on time for gigs. Within seconds of the listener discerning that ‘Silent Alarm’ is a fine punk-funk album (hear ‘ Helicopter’, the mouth-dryingly intense‘Pioneers’, the breakneck rumble of‘She’s Hearing Voices’), Bloc Party will pull out the sombre, least punk or funky thing possible (their‘Street Spirit’, ‘So Here We Are’, or the echoey, unsettling‘Compliments’). As quickly as I could declare them the finest emo band Britain’s ever produced, they’ll weasel out of it. The proof is unquestionable (the LP’s emotion and post-hardcore riffs backbone, and that in researching this review we found not one but two pictures of Kele wearing a backpack) but the xylophone-tastic, ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’-style epic ‘This Modern Love’ is so beyond emo it’s untrue. Which shows that Bloc Party are the Kriss Kross, Prince and Kate Bush -worshipping disposable pop kids that they have always claimed to be and not some maudlin post-punk muso types, as some have branded them.
With The Libertines on ice, London needs to get moving again and Bloc Party are the band for the job. Not only can they match the Libs for musical urgency and passion, but Bloc Party are managing to speak to people like Pete’n’Carl did too. They find “rock star behaviour completely abhorrent” (they’ll turn down that invite to Kate Moss’ next birthday party) and in that respect they’re the complete opposite of The Libertines. But in terms of the honesty and vulnerability shown here, and the fact that they’re unafraid to put themselves on the line, they are the true heirs to the Libs’ legacy.
They connect because their concerns are universal. Everyone knows someone like the woman suffering at the centre of ‘She’s Hearing Voices’ – “She’s hearing voices call her/She’s hearing voices warn her/She just can’t sleep in her bed/She just can’t sleep.” Not being able to sleep (a clinical sign of depression, or maybe it’s just plain old heartbreak) appears elsewhere on this record; “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep/I can’t sleep, I can’t dream”, Kele sings on‘Like Eating Glass’. In the same song, there’s the latchkey kids we were or we knew in “The children sent home from school/Will not stop crying”.
The xylophone-powered anthem ‘This Modern Love’ was made for being 15 years old, lying on your bed staring at the ceiling (“You told me you wanted to eat up my sadness/Well jump on, enjoy, you can gorge away”).
And there’s the wonderful ‘Pioneers’ which manages to combine the ridiculous hopelessness and optimism of, well, life itself. “If it can be broke then it can be fixed”, Kele gasps, like he’s defusing a bomb. “If it can be fused then it can be split” – he is defusing a bomb! And the chorus continues the theme with “We promised the world we’d tame it/What were we hoping for?”
Bloc Party aren’t just hoping, they’re trying. Maybe it’s over-long at 13 tracks but that’s just us being picky. ‘Silent Alarm’ is the unpigeonholeable soundtrack to 21st-century life as a cast-off. In a world of posers, fakers and bandwagon-jumpers, Bloc Party are unquestionably ‘4 real’. They never shy away from showing their truest feelings, even if those are of vulnerability or weakness. It’s this honesty which has spoken to people and will speak to a hell of a lot more when ‘Silent Alarm’ rings out beyond the desks of music journalists.
Bloc Party are to be believed in because they are a band for the whites, the blacks, the straights, the hip-hop kids, the freaks, the geeks, the emo kids, the punk-funkers, the queers and, yes, the fashionistas. Not because they are all these things (though they are a lot of them), nor because they’re all things to all men (in fact they’re the complete opposite). Back in 2002, Pete’n’Carl said it was‘Time For Heroes’. Well now it’s the anti-heroes’ time”.
On 2nd February, it will be twenty years since Bloc Party unleashed Silent Alarm. In terms of its legacy, Silent Alarm was shortlisted for the 2005 Mercury Music Prize. It lost out to Antony and the Johnsons' I Am a Bird Now. Silent Alarm was also nominated for the 2005 Shortlist Music Prize, but it was beaten by Sufjan Stevens' Illinois. It was also named Album of the Year for 2005 by NME, where it finished ahead of Arcade Fire's Funeral. Two decades after it came out, the mighty Silent Alarm still sounds…
FRESH and alive.