new bloc party album - a weekend in the city

At Les Trois Garcons
we meet at precisely 9 o'clock.
I order the foie gras
and I eat it with complete disdain.

Don't order the fucking foie gras then, you tit.

I'd have bitched about (and paid more attention to) the lyrics so much more if the production wasn't so hideous.

i always thought it was 'slack-jawed bitches'.

he's paraphrased an old un-used richey edwards lyric on one track too.

manics fans will know it when they hear it.

00Trent (2 weeks ago)
Like all their song's there is a great message. fantastic band.
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we've talked about about sutherland here for me to feel justified in asking if anyone knows what he is up to. cassidy came out in.. 2001?

In many ways this is exactly what I want modern slightly arty rock music to sound like but Kele drags it down with his bad singing and atrocious lyrics - This Is Not Home epitomises the whole problem really. Vocally at least, most of the songs use exactly the same melodic melodic tics, like Kele's sort of fumbling around in search of a tune.

i finally got a chance to listen to this loud in my car/hear the songs live and s0uthall is otm about how terribly produced this is. the guitars on the bottoms of the non-ballads are just hideous noise.

still one of the 4-5 best rock records released this year i think, but christ jacknife lee.

bottom*

man these guys fell off the planet pretty fast. being as dull as your music in interviews does not seem to be a winning strategy.

prob the only album i insist on playing god with but the b-sides are so much better than at least half of what made the album, particularly "cain said to abel" and "rhododendrons," the latter of which is prob kele's least embarrassing attempt to assess the themes of weekend

"kreuzberg" is prob my favorite bloc party song though

what's the brad version tracklist

1. song for clay
2. cain said to abel
3. waiting for the 7.18
4. we were lovers
5. rhododendrons
6. on
7. uniform
8. kreuzberg
9. i still remember
10. sunday
11. england
12. sxrt

recently revised (i had "selfish son" in there but felt it brought down the pacing, and decided I actually really like "uniform") and not thoroughly road-tested but i'm pretty confident this is 1000000x better than the released version

that tracklist looks great, really no idea how they managed to leave off Rhondodendrons and England especially, Rhondodendrons has to be one of my absolute favourites by them. I'm not huge on We Were Lovers and might take Selfish Son or Hunting for Witches over it but I understand how there's enough of those slow burn tracks like Selfish Son on it already

it's such a weird album, a lot of little awkward bits bring it down more than anything else, especially Kele's inability to write lyrics to fit his melodies

The Prayer has to be one of the worst attempts at 'incorporating an R&B influence' by an indie band ever lol - the beat is so awkward and impossible to move in any way to, but even then the chorus is still good

thx brad, I'll give er a shot. always found this album baffling

Now, y'see, the only change that I would make to the original album would be to remove 'Sunday' ...

... I know this album has some - to put it mildly - awkward lyrics, but I like this album and I've always liked this album, and even find parts of it ('Kreuzberg', 'SRXT') very moving. I think the bands heart was in the right place on this record.

'The Prayer' sounds more goth influenced to me than R&B influence. The synth in the chorus has Cure written all over it and the rhythms sound more to me like an up to date take on the kind of tribal rhythms that goth bands liked to use in the early '80s.

*influenced

Strongly agree that "England" should have been on the album proper.

Listened to this album repeatedly at the time, but hardly gone back to in in the last ten yers.

"sunday"'s lyrics are super dumb but the melody is so sweet

I'll probably never like "the prayer" even though on paper it is exactly my thing

"sunday" also has an amazing guitar solo, can't imagine the album without that moment

'Sunday' and 'Kreuzberg' feel quite similar to me, and if I was going to choose one over the other then 'Kreuzberg' is going to win.

I'm listening to the album again now and it sounds fine to me. I think Jacknife Lee records usually sound awful, but this is one of his more tolerable productions.

i think ppl's complaints up thread are more about the mastering. lee did a great job on silversun pickups' better nature recently, that record sounds awesome

Yeah, I think he's very inconsistent as a producer, and when combined with mastering that errs a bit on the hot side, it can make the whole thing seem a bit lifeless.

In the case of A Weekend in the City, it was obviously designed to be some kind of "blockbuster" album - a big sounding indie rock record for arenas that was supposed to make Bloc Party a very big and important band (it didn't) and it's mastered exactly in the way I would expect a rock record of that type to be in 2007. It's loud, but far from Death Magnetic/Vapour Trails/Playing the Angel levels of offensive, IMO.

it's just that the low end is real muddy, especially evident on streaming lol

with The Prayer, they talked a lot about wanting to move away from guitar music and only being into dance music & r&b etc at the time and Kele apparently said it was inspired by Busta Rhymes' Touch It lol

i still like the album quite a lot, it was just disappointing as a follow up to Silent Alarm and is kinda frustrating in how it's almost great. not like the albums that came after which are truly bad

I only like about half of the songs on four but I REALLY like those songs

I've never streamed this album - it's def. bottom heavy but my CD copy sounds fine.

In hindsight, I think the band themselves were demoralised by the fact that this album didn't set the world on fire - I remember reading an interview from the time where Matt Tong said they thought the record was going to be well received. The band seemed happy with the end result when it was released.

I don't think Intimacy and Four are awful albums - some of my favourite Bloc Party songs are on those albums: 'Signs', 'Talons', 'Halo', '3x3', 'V.A.L.I.S', 'Better Than Heaven' etc.

They should have broken up when Tong and Moakes left - their last album felt like it was done out of obligation.

I treat The Nextwave Sessions as their final release - 'Obscene' sounds a bit like a 1975 track and 'Montreal' is not a bad low-key groove. None of the tracks are top level Bloc Party, but I'll take it over anything after.

I love "Your Visits Are Getting Shorter", from the deluxe edition of 'Intimacy', but it's definitely more like a Kele solo track.

'Four' has a few really good moments too - "So He Begins to Lie" and "Kettling" I think. Some riffs in there.

I think I made it through 'HYMNS' once.

Y'know, I'm listening to Four now and it's sounding a lot better to me now than it did in 2012 - the only thing that I would immediately change are those bits where Kele is talking nonsense between some of the songs.

this album was ahead of its time

at least from an ideological standpoint

"flux" is wedged into the tracklist on streaming now i see.... incredible song

Oh, it's been like that for ages! After 'Flux' came out as a single, they re-released A Weekend in the City with it shoehorned into the tracklisting. I like it, but I'm not sure it fits.

I remember there being a lot of press surrounding 'Flux' and how it was billed as Bloc Party fully embracing electronic music and how it was supposed to be this change in sound for them - then I heard it and it just sounded like a Bloc Party song, not unusual at all.