Remix Me. I'm Going In...#5: Bloc Party

(photo by Shane Bee)

Bloc Party are big news these days. Their latest album has leaked around various blogs, and I'm sure if you knock up SoulSeek or the Hype Machine, you'll be able to find some tracks. I haven't listened myself. Silent Alarm is a good album, but certainly not flawless, and I'm not sure it warrants the excessive hype that surrounds it.

That said, the album captured what I think a lot of bands were going for a couple of years ago a lot better than most of those bands; when it gets it right, it's urgent, spiky, joyous; when it doesn't it grates horribly and leaves you wondering what all the fuss is about. I never expected Bloc Party to get quite as big as they are: why, when I first knew of them they were friends of a friend. Check me out, I saw one at a party once. If I bribe the right person, I could probably offer the guitarist's school shirt as a competition prize. But big they got, and fair play to them I suppose. At least they're aiming for a slightly higher intellectual level than most of their lowest-common-denominator peers, for which they have my respect.

You can tell a band is kind of pretentious when they release a remix album. For an indie band, at least. Silent Alarm Remixed came and went with, as usual, just a handful of decent versions. Four Tet's was (for me) the highlight, pouring on the gorgeous to a sublime rendering of So Here We Are, really the track that interested me about Bloc Party in the first place. I'll stick the original up here and another track from the remixes record, and another from the less frenetic facet of the Party, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner's take on Compliments.

The Music
Bloc Party - So Here We Are
Bloc Party - Compliments (Shibuyaaka Remix by Nick Zinner)

The 'fo
Artist: Bloc Party
Website: blocparty.com
Recommended: Silent Alarm
Label: Wichita
Buy: Amazon
More: Hype Machine; elbo.ws
If you like this you might like: Editors - The Back Room
Tags: Bloc Party; remix; Four Tet; Nick Zinner; Yeah Yeah Yeahs