Review Summary: For Tomorrow: A Guide to Contemporary British Music, 1988-2013 (Part 87)
For whatever reason, a substantial subsection of humanity came together at some point and decided that the best thing to do with the teenager, an animal whose still developing brain is chattering out hormones like a chain gun, is lock it in an institution with scores of other teenagers and let them fight it out. Surviving these years is a matter of swinging wildly at everyone around you or finding a way to absorb the blows. The former approach, the ones playing sports and/or navigating social circles with ruthless efficiency, is less noble than the latter but no less valid. Those latter kids, the ones failing gym and/or getting punted from social circles with ruthless efficiency, cope in a variety of crafty ways. They shrink to avoid confrontation or learn to self-deprecate, they hunker down with a core group of friends or they retreat into themselves. They shelter in art, finding solace in drama, comedy, and music.
Like The Smiths, Suede, and Radiohead before them, Bloc Party appeared on the scene in 2005 as life raft for weak teenagers. “I think the whole point of [
Silent Alarm] was to deal with teens. It's so hard to feel or be moved. Youth is so cynical. There's never anything to believe in as a teen.” lead singer Kele Okereke told Pitchfork in 2005. There will always be losers and weirdos that need bands to build their lives around, fronted by people with the kind of high ideas and ambition that might save them. Indie-rock had been filling that role for decades when Bloc Party strode through the the post-punk revival to plunk down their debut. Bloc Party didn’t do anything particularly new, they were just perfecting an amalgamation of influences, but with
Silent Alarm they got closer to the heart of the modern teenage experience than anyone has before or since.
Though Okereke was 23 at the time of
Silent Alarm’s release, he spoke the language of teenagers fluently and across the record’s 13 tracks he does not sentimentalize or sweeten anything. This is adolescence in real time, strangling panic giving way to manic happiness within the same afternoon. So Okereke writes from the hormone splattering brain of the teenager, all chopped non-sequiturs and choking terror. On “Positive Tension” he nails the casual callousness (“She said, ‘You’re just as boring as everyone else with your tut and your moan and your squeal and your squelch’”), the ennui (“Nothing ever happens”), the fear (“And you cannot hide or ever put it away”), and, finally, the sharp insult that sends you home in tears (“Why’d you have to get
so ***ing useless). “Luno” is the purest angst (“And you're tired of your Mum/And you're tired of your Dad/Got you jumping through hoops/Got you shaving your legs”) colliding with bitter nostalgia (“Come back to me the the way you were when we were young”) and a bloody nose. “Banquet” masterfully tackles both the creeping terror of growing old (“Turning away from the light/Becoming adult/Turning into myself”) and sex (“I wanted to bite not destroy/To feel her underneath/Turning into the light”) just within the chorus.
Complementing this approach is lead guitarist Russell Lissack, a guitarist firmly in the Jonny Greenwood circa-
The Bends mode (right down to the haircut), all cagy atmosphere giving way to stabbing riffs and tightly wound soloing. Lissack excels at knowing when to hold back too, kicking off “Like Eating Glass” (for my money, one of the best debut album openers of all time) with the simple but effective blare of an open E string that becomes a thrilling dive-bomb swoop after the drums take the song through the atmosphere.
In addition to the scary hormones, during adolescence the brain is flooded with so much blissful dopamine that you’ll hit unstable highs you’ll never reach again.
Silent Alarm also catches those rare moments of staggering and slightly scary wonder. On “This Modern Love” a first fumbling attempt at intimacy blooms with an instrumental rush of wonder and the essential twinge of awkwardness (“And you told me you wanted to eat up my sadness/Well jump in enjoy/Engorge away”). On the incredible “Blue Light”, lead guitarist Russell Lissack slides up and down his fretboard like passing streetlights ghosting over the car before the song explodes upwards with such majesty it feels like it could disappear over the horizon but the band reign it in to hover just off the ground as the band handing off the refrain “You are the bluest light” with a shiver inducing grace.
Part of the reason
Silent Alarm remains so fresh a decade on is the way Bloc Party invert traditional band dynamics. Typically, attention focuses around the lead singer, then the guitarist, while the rhythm section are lucky to get a sentence or two. On
Silent Alarm, the most important member of Bloc Party is the only one without his own Wikipedia page. For the worth of his contributions,
Silent Alarm might as well be by Matt Tong & the Bloc Party.
Matt Tong, drummer extraordinaire, is the one who detonates 10 tons of rocket fuel underneath “Like Eating Glass” and doesn’t ease those thrusters for the next 11 tracks. On
Silent Alarm, Tong balances a dance floor minded groove with mechanical precision. Often he locks his kick drum into a four to the floor groove while letting his sticks handle addictive hi-hat/snare/tom patterns. “She’s Hearing Voices” is built from the ground up around his walloping pattern. The hi-hat/snare interplay is subtly the catchiest part of the choruses of “Banquet”. Tong’s little touches - the three crash cymbal hits during the intro to “Helicopter”, shifting the measure ending snare hits on “Luno” just a little to the right, slicing up the choruses to “Banquet” with his red light-green light snare rolls - that feel wholly essential when threaded into the song. Tong’s most essential contribution to
Silent Alarm though is that he never, ever lets momentum flag. On
Silent Alarm’s ballads Tong alters his dynamics instead of his tempo for the necessary lightness. Coupled with simple but effective bassist Gordon Moakes (who knew better than to get in Tong’s way) Tong lead one of the best rhythm sections in indie rock history.
Above everything,
Silent Alarm is an URGENT album. Which is appropriate since it’s about a time of urgent, technologically aided panic. A time when Friday comes, your friends made plans, but you’re three texts deep with no reply. A time when social media has taken the face-to-face or even voice-to-voice out of hurtful confrontation. A time when you know for certain you were left out because everyone’s posting pictures of the party in real time.
Silent Alarm is the nostalgia free report from the front lines of adolescence and on its final dispatch, “Compliments”, Bloc Party strip away all of their established strengths for one final wide angle shot of teenage malaise. Over the stoic plunk of a drum machine and a wash of atmospherics Okereke moans “We sit and we sigh and nothing gets done/So right, so clued up, we just get old/And all the while been torn asunder/Nicotine and bacteria”. The song ebbs, swells, and ends without proper climax, closing an uncertain album on an uncertain note.
But that’s okay.
Silent Alarm doesn’t have any answer nor does it pretend to. Some teens don’t want to be pandered to, they don’t want to be told everything is going to be okay, they just want to know they’re not the only ones struggling. For those discovering it while in high school, it’s an album to cling to when things get treacherous and one to believe in when you decide to make your own music. For those discovering it after you’ve left your high school behind, it’s a potent reminder that there isn’t much to miss about those days.
