Sidewalk Hustle

Most peo­ple who know me know I have a bizarre and a tad-bit creepy love for Bloc Party and now all of you who don’t know me know it too. This love started slowly and nat­u­rally as an out­growth of admi­ra­tion for the young band when I first saw them live way back in 2005, when they were tour­ing for Silent Alarm. At that time I had just moved back from Van­cou­ver, and had decided to under­take a mon­u­men­tal task, that was to lit­er­ally change my life. Silent Alarm reached out to me with a com­fort­ing and under­stand­ing promise. I found in it expe­ri­ences sim­i­lar to my own as well as energy and frus­tra­tion for want­ing more. I was smit­ten. When I had the chance to see them live I took it. That year they came to town a lot, at least three times, and another two the fol­low­ing year.
There must be some­thing about Toronto.
I went to their shows when I could, and tried to recruit as many peo­ple to my cause. That was not at all a chal­lenge because Silent Alarm seemed to res­onate and appeal to almost everyone.

I feel it nec­es­sary to divulge this to every­one because I wanted to dis­cuss inti­mately with you Bloc Party’s new album Inti­macy. Announced, and released only four days later to the eager hands of excited fans. I am one of those eager lit­tle fans, one who with his credit card in hand and heart in a con­fused roller coaster ride of ado­les­cent puppy love that ordered the album in advance and woke up early Thurs­day (August 21st) morn­ing to down­load it.

Now, from Monday’s announce­ment to the “run-up” to Thurs­day, not much had been said about the album except the song titles and the tag of “exper­i­men­tal” as well as “clas­sic Bloc Party.”

I had thought that the first sin­gle “Mer­cury” had been some exper­i­men­tal ish… I had forced myself to enjoy it… I even threw it down in a playlist. But I never truly Loved it!!!! Not the way I love “Ban­quet” or “Hunt­ing for Witches” but that wasn’t really a con­cern, since there was still another ten tracks on the album. I chalked it up to the band dip­ping their toes into new ponds, as the say­ing goes.

Now for those of you out there who have already lis­tened to the album, the first two songs are like a sonic boom of studio-engineered… Wow! Not exactly what’s needed to sup­ple­ment your morn­ing cof­fee and paper read­ing! “Ares” the kick off song, sounds badly con­structed and slightly con­fus­ing. That may have been me at 8:00 am, but it still has yet to grow on me.

“Mer­cury” was next which would have been splen­did if it had achieved what a sin­gle is sup­pose to achieve, that of being charm­ing and comforting-by-being-familiar-because-it-was-played-a-fuckload-of-times-and-now-is-non-offensive-to-the-general-public… which sadly it did not.

From track three onwards the album is solid, not clas­sic Bloc Party but com­pa­ra­ble in qual­ity to some less-then-classic Bloc Party moments. Once I fig­ured this out I have started lis­ten­ing to Inti­macy from track three onwards, which makes the short ten tracks of their album a mea­ger help­ing of eight EP wor­thy tracks.

Because I have a school-girl crush on Bloc Party, I am hop­ing it will work out this way: that the August 21st 2008 release is NOT the actual album, but a rough copy released to the fans as a teaser and sam­pler to help tickle the fancy of the gen­eral pub­lic. I am hop­ing that the actual, phys­i­cal album, that is going to be released at the end of Octo­ber will actu­ally be a touch longer and some of the other, more exper­i­men­tal tracks are worked upon a lit­tle longer. I am keep­ing my fin­gers crossed, and my heart still long­ing, and hope­fully the boys are still in the stu­dio work­ing out the kinks.