Dusted Down: Bloc Party – A Weekend In The City

The lost Weekend, re-discovered

Celebrating 20 years as a band with a run of legacy shows including a performance at London’s Crystal Palace Park this summer, post-punk heroes Bloc Party have opted to finally reissue their seminal second (2007’s A Weekend In The City), third (2008’s Intimacy) and fourth (2012’s Four) full-length LPs, all of which have enjoyed far too much time boasting ludicrously inflated flipper prices on Discogs. While the current iteration of the lineup only boasts two of the OG four members in Kele Okereke and Russell Lissack, marketing appears to indicate the upcoming shows will focus less on the lukewarm received later material, and primarily cater to their iconic 2005 debut album Silent Alarm and the hits from that initial era, which included founding drummer Matt Tong and bassist/keyboardist/backing vocalist Gordon Moakes, though neither shall be participating.

It makes sense then, that if the band plan to dust off a bevvy of anthems from their acclaimed first four album run, that they’d opt to dust down these records and make them readily available again for fans and collector’s both new and old. Silent Alarm seems like it’s always in print, which makes sense when factoring in massive singles such as ‘Helicopter’ and ‘Banquet’, yet there’s often been a dichotomy in the fanbase between those who feel the band immediately set out upon a downward slope in quality with each subsequent project, and then those who feel the lessons of their debut were paramount in informing the creative journey that would only truly take shape on their sophomore effort.

Noted for Okereke’s displeasure with his own early lyrical attempts, A Weekend In The City saw opaque metaphors switched out for painstaking attention to detail, with specific meals, drugs, locations, bars, sexual encounters, lazy hangovers and suicide attempts all dissected in painstaking clarity, while musically the band would push their frenetic post-punk intricacies into darker territories on the likes of ‘Song For Clay (Disappear Here)’ and the now all-too-relevant ‘Hunting For Witches’, while the increase in electronic production noted on ‘The Prayer’ and ‘Flux’ would become staples and identifiers of the Bloc Party blueprint moving forward.

Returning only the following year with the nosedive into dance-punk abandon that was Intimacy; a project initially maligned for its more digital production and seemingly rushed nature, this is often regard as Okereke’s breakup album, detailing a relationship imploding within the detailed cityscape of London. Complete with allusions to staying drunk in Soho and sharing a flat in Bethnal Green, the musical meandering of fusing their electronically based proclivities with their established post-punk formula, proved a step too far for purists still desiring another LP chock full of Helicopters. Time and reappraisal have been kind to the album, with singles such as the brazen ‘Mercury’ and harrowing ‘Talons’ growing to become fan favourites, while the more subdued moments found on the slow-building synthwave of ‘Signs’, the glitched out choral horror of ‘Zephyrus’, and the euphoric electro-punk crescendo of ‘Better Than Heaven’ are easily some of the finest examples of recorded Bloc Party output and go toe to toe with anything from their debut.

Often unfairly forgotten about, Four arrived in 2012 following Okereke’s solo venture into club-centric garage-house on 2010’s The Boxer LP, with many fans already perceiving that all was clearly not well in the Bloc camp. The final full-length to feature Gordon Moakes and Matt Tong before creative differences would see them both vacate their positions, the material on Four harks back to a joke once made in an interview that each album would cater to a specific member’s influences. Whether this comment charted a course led by irony or sincerity, Four embraced every facet of the band’s formula; mixing the indie post-punk of Silent Alarm, the art rock grandeur of A Weekend In The City, and the glitchy dance-punk of Intimacy; yet allowing influences and ideas to breathe for full scale songs instead of melting pots of ideas. From the indie-pop lead single ‘Octopus’, to the Smashing Pumpkins indebted 90’s alt rock triumph of ‘Kettling’, to the bluegrass-turned-hardcore banger ‘Coliseum’, there’s no denying the swansong quality the project has retrospectively garnered when assessing the fearless and purposeful lack of direction or cohesion throughout, though there’s still time for post-punk balladry on the saccharine ‘Truth’ and muted post-folk of ‘Real Talk’.

Finaly repressed to vinyl, these three long out-of-print classics have lingered in the shadow of the consistently available Silent Alarm for far too many a moon and left vast gaps in the shelf space of collectors between the debut and the later post-half-reunion LPs. Complete with the bonus tracks/b-sides from each album cycle, with Four even featuring the entirety of ‘The Nextwave Sessions’ EP (the final piece of recorded output with the OG lineup), fans can now rejoice and complete their collections without having to take out a second mortgage or forever pine over the one odd bonus cut that got away.

Zach Buggy

To pre-order your copy of A Weekend In The City, out on July 26, click here