polaroids of androids

Seeing as Bloc Party are in town this week playing TWO sold out shows at the Hordern Pavilion we thought it was about time we delivered our long overdue thoughts on how terrible their new record is. How terrible is it? Well, our original review was pretty much just a list of the WORST things we could think of. Things that were really really bad, but we still thought were better than the album.

A sample..

Kaiser Chiefs, ball cancer, the AIDS crisis, genocide in Darfur, starvation, Mugabe, apartheid, David Hasselhoff's music career, sleeping with George W. Bush, sleeping with Hilary Clinton, Peter Andre, Hitler, segway scooters, the great stock market crash of 1929, frudes, out-of-date milk, violent prison sex, the worst album by 2pac's least talented weedcarrier, Adam Sandler romantic comedies, Van She's album, Windows Vista, getting stabbed with a pen in the neck, YouTube comments, accidentally hitting cmd+q when you mean cmd+w, impotence...

.. there was about seventeen more A1 pages of things like that.

As funny as we thought our list was (we self-LOL'd over it for about two weeks) it didn't really contain any useful information on why we thought this album was so very bad and exactly where we thought the group had gone so horribly wrong.

The saddest thing about Intimacy is that it was created by THE SAME BAND THAT MADE SILENT ALARM! That fact is now pretty damn hard to believe considering the general blandness of A Weekend In The City and then this - an album which seems a lot more focused on following whatever everyone else is doing.

And that right there is the problem. This album sounds like a group emulating the current trends in music rather than setting their own. Electro-rock is (kinda) big right now so that is exactly the 'spin' that Bloc Party have put on their sound. The mind-blowing awesomeness of tracks like Like Eating Glass, Helicopter, Banquet etc etc is all just a distant memory now, buried deep under the group's latest directionless, soulless and (dare I say) 'fake' reinvention.

Everything on Intimacy is overcooked. The massively talented rhythm section which made Silent Alarm such a brilliant album are hidden behind a thick layer of (what sounds like) four billion shitty Pro Tools effects. There are an insane amount of unnecessary electro-based blips, zips, hand claps and drum loops scattered across the album which - instead of adding any value to the songs and showing the band experimenting by widening their core sound - feel a lot more like last minute extra studio layers.

The band recently revealed that they had decided to let one member take control of the direction of each one of their albums (as they currently have a four album deal). Intimacy is apparently drummer Matt Tong's record. It feels a lot like he has tried to bring in his obviously fairly strong electronic influences and attempted to fit them around the group's core sound - which (much like on A Weekend In The City) seems to be built around Kele Okereke's vocals. While once a reasonable accompaniment to the group's musical talents they are now an overshadowing force. So much so that if you don't LOVE Okereke's voice then you are destined to dislike the songs.

Although I might be in the minority with my negative feelings towards this album (remember, TWO sold out shows at the MASSIVE Hordern Pavilion!) I honestly think that when graphing Bloc Party's career in years to come most will place Intimacy as a low dip. I hold a small glimmer of hope that they may once return to the greatness of their debut, but at this point it seems highly unlikely.