Outpaced by the cool kids of English rock, Kele Okereke’s band proves with this seventh album that it is now at its best by abandoning the hard-hitting melodies in favor of delicate ballads. It’s called Growing Up, certainly not Growing Old.
The cult around Banquet, Helicopter or Hunting for Witches has the perverse effect of sidelining the melancholy and lyricism that have always underpinned Bloc Party’s music: Tulips, The Pioneers, This Modern Love, Srxt, I Still Remember… There was in these tracks all the softness, all the sensitivity and all the vulnerability of a band forever linked to a mythical scene: that of a decade that saw riffs surge from all corners of England, adherents to the overdriven riff who cared less about sparking a revolution than about embracing chaos with style – hence the title of a recently published book on the subject, The World Was a Mess but His Hair Was Perfect: The Last Indie Music Scene 2000-2010.
If Kele Okereke and his crew continue to lean from time to time on short, frenetic riffs (Love Bombs, Pigwig, etc.), with the dancefloor in sight, Anatomy of a Brief Romance reveals from the opening (22.01.22) a more tempered face, in whispers and in delicate atmospheric loops. This tenderness stems from the very nature of this seventh album, produced by an old-hand in the studio (Trevor Horn), which condenses in fourteen songs a love story, from the first furtive glances exchanged in a gym to the definitive farewell.
Romantic Flair
So the title proves true: Anatomy of a Brief Romance is to be heard as the memory of a relationship, its swan song, with all the contradictory emotions that this entails. In nearly fifty minutes, we move through joyous moments, all magnified by synthetic melodies that tilt toward the band’s best bangers – the very pop-rock Muscleworks, the “James Bond-esque” Coming on Strong – before brushing against the gloom in ballads that mimic disillusion to better ward off its effects.
Without being perfect – some songs come off a tad too verbose, others falter through classicism –, Anatomy of a Brief Romance captivates with its willingness to go further, and in more intimate experiments, the motifs of a new vertigo. Fueled by a desire not to recite a rehearsed discourse about the band’s previous albums, and aimed at infusing Lagoon Blue, Clark Kent or Rotherhithe with the tension and romantic breath that run through Bloc Party’s best productions.
Anatomy of a Brief Romance (Contagious/Virgin Music Group/Universal). Sortie le 11 septembre.
