Bloc Party – One Month Off

Bloc Party are a band caught uneasily between dance music and rock music. That’s not to say they can’t create great music, it’s just that their best songs are either Rock (’Banquet’, ‘Song for Clay’) or Dance (’Flux’, ‘Mercury’) and they don’t seem able to combine the two in a satisfying way like, say, The Rapture or TV on the Radio can.

‘One Month Off’ from latest album Intimacy appears to be an attempt to bridge the gap. Sporting a standard pop structure, it layers on effects with a skittery breakbeat in the background and even sports a silly breakdown with distorted yelps. It is, however, exhausting to listen to – even at three and a half minutes long, the complete lack of sonic variation and hugely compressed dynamic range make you long for respite.

The lyrics aren’t much better, and seem to be mainly written by combining vaguely meaningless slogan-like sentences like “Fighting fire with firewood” with the now-requisite London reference: “When we started this it was paradise, not just Bethnal Green” on a vague theme of betrayal and desertion. As much as I like Bloc Party, and I do like them, I think the oft-repeated attack of “undergraduate-level lyricist” levelled at Kele Okereke is a difficult one to shake off.

It’s not awful, by any means, it’s just so throwaway. There’s none of the breathless excitement or thrilling climaxes offered by some of their other singles. It sounds like a song that needed to be written to pad out the album – Bloc Party by numbers (listen to that bridge – it could be inserted into any of their songs without anyone noticing). Still listenable, but maybe Bloc Party need to take a bit more than a month off and write the great songs they’re clearly capable of before entering the studio next time.