“Like Eating Glass” — perfect Side One Track One. Scratch that, it’s two kinds of perfect Side One Track Ones. At least for the first 30 seconds, think Interpol’s “Untitled” or the xx’s “Intro,” a band coming into their debut so confident and fully-formed that they start the thing with their own instrumental walk-up music. In Bloc Party’s case, the blare of an open E string, basically a tuning exercise, announces that surely, Shit’s About to Go Down. And then it’s just a classic “go as hard as possible” S1T1: Think “Arcarsenal” or “Bleed American” — all tension, no release, a song that still makes the rest of the tracklist feel like an exhale every single time. No notes; even Kelly Clarkson had to pay respect.
However, this is no longer the definitive version of the song for me.
I missed Bloc Party’s set at Music Midtown 2005, an Atlanta festival that also featured the White Stripes, the Killers, Coheed And Cambria, Tom Petty, Black Eyed Peas, and Def Leppard (we used to be a country, a proper country). As a result, I never got to see them during the touring cycle for Silent Alarm, released 20 years ago this Saturday. In lieu of this, I tried checking YouTube for live footage and came across “Like Eating Glass” on Later…With Jools Holland. It’s a perfectly good performance, not one that I’ve seen inducted into the late night canon with “Wolf Like Me,” “One Big Holiday,” “One Armed Scissor” or any time Blood Brothers managed to get on TV. What really struck me is how Bloc Party dressed for the occasion.
Kele Okereke is wearing a plaid flannel and Russell Lissack, despite having modeled every part of his physique and pedalboard from Jonny Greenwood, rocks a snug, vintage Knott’s Berry Farm t-shirt. They both play Telecasters. Matt Tong is a tornado of limbs moving under a bowl haircut and glasses. As my editors read this windup, I can picture them groaning from hundreds of miles away – “oh god, not this again.” At the 10-year anniversary of Silent Alarm, there’d be no reason to point out that Bloc Party initially looked like a band that grew up on the Get Up Kids and not Gang of Four. But while the still thriving new wave of UK post-punk sounds nothing at all like Silent Alarm, it’s been an explicitly stated staple influence in the emo-sphere for artists as far-reaching as Stay Inside, Bartees Strange, SeeYouSpaceCowboy and their unexpected benefactors in Paramore, who took them out as openers on their most recent North American tour. The artists that hold the torch for Silent Alarm in the 2020s see it for what it was, a vulnerable and earnestly ambitious crossover record in a scene that valued the exact opposite of these things.
Not that Bloc Party were exactly miscast in 2005. Their first big break came when an early single was included on a label compilation released by — I’m not making this name up – Angular Recording Corporation. Steve Aoki signed them to Dim Mak after receiving an early 7″ of “She’s Hearing Voices,” and that label soon partnered with VICE to release Silent Alarm. So if they’re included on your Indie Sleaze playlists, fair play – after all, “Banquet” was the big hit, and it’s got those disco hi-hats on the 2 and 4, and “She’s got such a dirty mind and it never ever stops” is basically everything you’d want out of an Indie Sleaze lyric.
Silent Alarm also arrived in a transitional period between the more tawdry, tabloid-ready debuts of the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys. It was a time where the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Maximo Park, Kaiser Chiefs, Art Brut, and the Futureheads thrived, all of them arch, self-aware, and distinctly British. The frontmen wore bowler hats and/or suits, generally seemed just a little too old to be leading a buzzy band, and carried themselves like they could’ve been music journalists at some point in their early 20s. Though Bloc Party shared their taste for choppy guitar chords and austere, analog production, they had “little brother” energy in spades, a needling directness that could easily translate to American kids in the suburbs.
When they wrote about the Iraq War, the end result was a song literally called “Price Of Gasoline”; Okereke sang “I’ve been driving a midsized car” like the prospect of driving any car was still in the future. Lissack and Okereke wrote a harmonized guitar riff that recreated the Wagon-Wheel Effect and called the song “Helicopter” for that reason alone. The song title “Positive Tension” is a far more accurate description of what Bloc Party do than “silent alarm.” There wasn’t any sex in their love songs (yet); the headrush buildup of “Blue Light” was meant to soundtrack a first kiss, the nebular twinkles of “So Here We Are” a first love, “This Modern Love” a first heartbreak. “Do you want to come over and kill some time/ Throw your arms around me” effectively neutralized any of the toxicity coming from the VICE offices.
Another important point about that Jools Holland performance of “Like Eating Glass”: The final verse is replaced by a half-lyric from “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.” Yes, it’s a Smiths song, but the most popular one by far because it drops all of the arch, distinctly British stuff (aside from the double-decker bus) and goes straight to the starry-eyed romanticism that countless movies have taught us lies underneath every cynic. But there’s a different, “little brother” ’80s rock institution that I hear underlying Silent Alarm: not the U2 that was one year removed from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb but the earliest version that could still be credibly described as “post-punk.”
It’s not just because Bloc Party also liked to add glockenspiel parts to their most passionate fist-pumpers, though that hardly seems like a coincidence. From the beginning, this band meant business. Lissack and Okereke were teenage pals, but they weren’t about to add any old dudes from the neighborhood; bassist Paul Moakes answered an ad in NME, and Matt Tong won an audition for the drummer gig, like these guys were already Queens Of The Stone Age or something. (Just try to imagine how demoralizing it would’ve been to be the guy trying out immediately after Tong.)
Okereke also made very Bono-like claims about wanting Silent Alarm to be “Technicolor,” something that evoked a bygone era of grand gestures; implied in that descriptor is the belief that “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore.” “Technicolor” is not an accurate literal description of Silent Alarm, which is one of the least warm and psychedelic albums of its era. As it should be; the sound takes after the color palette of the album cover, bold and bracing, the icy hot aural equivalent of a polar plunge. I take “Technicolor” to mean “the thing you caught on tape, touched up and exaggerated in post.” You wouldn’t know that the producer ended up working with Adele, but Paul Epworth was a professional through and through, knowing how to max out all four members. Lissack’s lead frippery and Okereke’s rhythm guitars were hard-panned, leaving enough space to hear every octopus-armed drum fill careening through the stereo field. Moakes is the glue guy, capable of taking the melodic lead or holding down the low end when Lissack wants his guitars to sound like steel shavings.
None of that sounds like “three chords and the truth,” but still, if Bloc Party took any lesson from U2, it’s the most important one: Hooks and choruses are all well and good, but slogans are better. Nearly every track on Silent Alarm wants to have its own “WALK AWAY, I WILL FOLLOW,” “TWO HEARTS BEAT AS ONE!” or “IN THE NAME OF LOVE!” – “WE’RE GONNA WIN THIS,” “LIKE DRINKING POISON/ LIKE EATING GLASS,” “THIS MODERN LOVE BREAKS ME,” “ARE YOU HOPING FOR A MIRACLE,” “I’LL GO BACK IF YOU ASK ME.” And while “Pioneers” is likely no one’s choice for the definitive Silent Alarm cut, it contains the lyric that basically plotted the next 20 years of Bloc Party’s career: “We promised the world we’d tame it/ What were we hoping for?”
Everything that immediately followed suggested a band that was believing their own hype but also deserved it. I’m not trying to damn with faint praise when I say that Silent Alarm Remixed might really be the best indie rock remix album ever made; that Four Tet take on “So Here We Are” alone could redeem the entire cursed subgenre. And when it came time to make the proper follow-up to Silent Alarm, Bloc Party didn’t just evoke U2 – they hired the guy behind the boards of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, giving Jacknife Lee a mandate that wasn’t “Technicolor” so much as “Transformers CGI.”
A Weekend In The City indeed sounds like an album 15 years ahead of its time, in spite of Lee’s bionic, rock ‘em-sock ‘em overproduction. By the 2020s, indie bands were regularly reckoning with intersectionality of race and sexuality and political violence as boldly as Okereke did on “I Still Remember” and “Where Is Home?” Still, the tensions between Okereke’s interests and the limitations of a rock band, even one as adventurous as Bloc Party, remain unresolved. Okereke makes often clubby and often clumsy music under his own name that never threatens to overshadow his main gig, but you can tell his heart’s always in it. In between taking four or so years to make increasingly desperate and dispiriting studio albums, Bloc Party do nostalgia festivals and full album-playthroughs with an entirely new rhythm section that includes a guy from Menomena.
When Bloc Party made Silent Alarm, they almost certainly envisioned themselves playing American arenas and amphitheaters in 2023. But there’s a cruel irony in how that actually came to pass. In the original Pitchfork review, Nitsuh Abebe encapsulated the album’s broad appeal in one of my all-time favorite passages: Silent Alarm is “the kind [of album] that wants to be worth every penny any lawn-mowing pre-teen might spend on it.” Or, maybe in Hayley Williams’ case, whatever she earmarked from her Atlantic Records advance; am I not supposed to hear “Miracle” as Paramore’s attempt at “Helicopter”? Williams described Silent Alarm as the “number one reference” for 2022’s This Is Why, which had to be a bit of a mindfuck for Okereke – he’d spent the past 20 years trying to evolve beyond Silent Alarm, and here’s one of the most popular and respected rock bands of the 21st century working towards it and winning a couple of Grammys. “We will not be the last” — truer words than Okereke could have imagined.
