Bloc Party's Silent Alarm Poll

something glorious is about to happen

real "it's so coooooold. in this house" hours

my heat is in fact out

though not on the album itself, "two more years" is a perfect song

i remember returning this cd to fopp because i thought it was terrible and the guy at the counter just looked at me and shook his head in dismay. have always liked banquet though. maybe i should give it another go

cheers for letting me know of the existence of "Two More Years", ufo. I haven't liked much from this band post-Silent Alarm, so it's cool to discover this new-to-me song from that early era. I see there's also a few songs I've never heard on the early EPs

“Little Thoughts” and “Tulips” are great too.

they have a ton of great non-album material, just from the silent alarm era there's the following non-album tracks and most of them are excellent:

always new depths
storm & stress
skeleton
staying fat
little thoughts
tulips
hero
the marshals are dead
the present
two more years
the answer

"the present" especially is one of their very best too and they just gave it away to a charity compilation.

the a weekend in a city b-sides also have some particularly strong tracks among them, that really could have been a great album if they'd put the right material on it. "rhondodendrons" especially

Thank you for the list! Yeah I really like 3 or 4 tracks from Weekend but as a whole, found it disappointing, and Intimacy ... bleh. I'll check out the Weekend b-sides though

i think AWITC is still good, just disappointing compared to what it could have been and let down by production that didn't really do it any favours. maybe half of intimacy is worthwhile? they really became a band that was absolutely determined to ignore & avoid their own strengths

Of the ‘AWITC’ b-sides “England” is my favourite. Should have been on the album.

“cain said to abel” >>>>>

damn the way i played the shit out of "staying fat", "little thoughts," "always new depths" etc driving around in high school. fuck

I think a lot of bands that begin as "a spectacular sum" on early records will, over time, find the primary creator subconsciously shunting and/or minimizing the work of the other contributors. It's not like they're "determined to ignore and avoid their own strengths" so much as it's a natural by-product of the maturing process. I do miss Tong with the band he was an incandescent drummer

the whole band was pretty direct in interviews for a while about being bored by rock music and wanting to make more experimental music influenced by radiohead, hip-hop & dance music but this often lead to pretty bad and bizarre results, it wasn't just okereke & lissack leading, though it does seem like they increasingly became the dominant creative force as a duo.

there's definitely some of what you're talking about with increasingly sidelining tong in favour of programmed beats etc. on awitc & intimacy though.

then when they did the back-to-basics rock album with four, it was actually the biggest departure for them & showed that they weren't really very interested in what they'd done before at all anymore, they all talked about being really into grunge when making it. you can kinda hear that influence in the heavier sound of it but it's a pretty idiosyncratic (& not very good) album. i saw them live on that tour and they put on a good show though, despite there apparently being a ton of bad blood behind the scenes which lead to tong & moakes quitting a few months later.

they were also regularly pretty disparaging of silent alarm as boring rock music etc. for quite a while, i'm not sure they gave that up until they did the playing-it-in-full tour (which was great even without tong & moakes)

Even though I didn't care for about half of AWITC, I thought they put on an amazing show during that tour (the only time I've seen them). Even the AWITC songs I didn't like were carried by the band's energy. Tong was insane to see live