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Not many bands portray their music as living noise, but British indie-rock band Bloc Party says thats exactly what they play. With their jerky guitar pop, irresistible hooks and big ideas, Bloc Party has been compared to such cult icons as Sonic Youth and The Pixies.
Released in 2005, the bands first album Silent Alarm hit record stores with a bang, with Billboard calling it one of the best debuts of 2005 and Entertainment Weekly tagged it as a post-punk mishmash of angular guitars, pulsating bass, and tricky time signatures. The Village Voice wrote Bloc Party borrow the soaring melodic guitar lines of Television and sinuous noodling of New Order and the Cure to add a lushness that makes these songs sonically beautiful as well as rhythmically aggressive.
The bands lead singer Kele Okereke, however, wanted to get away from all the media hype about the album. With this record I really wanted it to have more varied textures and just make something that was really representative of what we were listening to as a band, which wasnt the typical Wire-y post punk thing that everyone umed about us when we first came onto the scene, said Okereke.
Bloc Partys much-anticipated second album, A Weekend in the City, debuted in February 2007. The band said the new release is the living noise of a metropolis daily life in a modern city, and the quiet desolation that suffuses everything from commuting to casual sex, from going out on a Friday night to the long ride home in the early hours of the morning.
Lost at Sea wrote, A Weekend in the City showcases what all the band’s initial buzz was about, but twists and filters what might have been expected, leaving them open to praise for different reasons.
Inspiring comparisons to Daft Punk to David Bowie to Prince, Austins Ghostland Observatorys dynamic sound and high-energy performances have taken many by surprise. Its some of the most decidedly unique music Ive heard in a long time, wrote one New York critic.
With two self-released CDs, singer/guitarist Aaron Behrens and producer/drummer Thomas Turner spend hours working in their south Austin studio to create music that not only heals their beat-driven hearts, but pleases their rock n roll souls.
Their first release, 2004s delete.delete.i.eat.meat, was an audacious amalgam of electronics, drums, guitar and vocals. In Sound wrote with their spectral blend of buoyant electronics, frantic-yet-precise drum work, cleanly hyper driven guitar, and sometimes gasping, sometimes ecstatic vocal delivery, the Ghostland Observatory have birthed a sound that can only be described as a dripping-wet sexplosion of instant addiction.
Less than a year later, Ghostland released Paparazzi Lightning to equally high praise. Three Imaginary Girls wrote: Its tough to believe just two dudes create this monstrosity of sound. They pack a smacking aural punch of whip-snap dance music in the post-punk vein.
Saturday, December 20 at 12am on WMFE TV!
Duration : 0:0:33
Television commercial for Spike seasoning from the late 1970’s. Fantastico!
