Bloc Party is sounding the silent alarm in Birmingham

Bloc Party | prevention
Birmingham O2 Institute
Friday, June 28, 2024

“Something glorious is about to happen!” Kele’s heroes return to Birmingham for the first time in a long time, presenting their landmark album Silent Alarm as it turns twenty. Sam Lambeth dines on a banquet of legendary rock staples.

All In Good Time is the name prevention‘ primarily and so far alone, but everything in short would be a better summation of their career to date. Only on their fourth gig and The Preventions have already secured a support slot with one of the UK’s best-loved indie stalwarts, with sell-out shows of their own and a Glastonbury gig on the horizon. They have as many Spotify followers as Count Binface has electoral votes. Google tells you that you should search for a Cornish outfit called “Prevention”.

All this will not last, of course. Polished but still delightfully ungainly, the band toe the line between throaty, Catfish-esque rock and more Smithsian beauty. Looking like a thrift store Targaryen, their lead singer (whose name we can’t find – that’s how unknown this band is, people) has style to a T and wears his influences on his sleeve. “I used to play FIFA ’05 and hear Bloc Party’s song Helicopter and it made me want to play guitar,” he says. He would later prove this by spending most of Bloc Party’s set headlining and crowdsurfing. Bigger things await.

Anyone familiar Bloc Partyhis trajectory and ethos should now know one thing – expect the unexpected. Originally anointed as the heir to Franz Ferdinand on the spiky, sticky-floor indie dancefloors of 2005, Kele Okereke and co have since enjoyed a career that has continued to surprise and defy. Solo tours, forays into dance music, a free album and more band turmoil than Sugababes and The Fall combined, it should come as no surprise, then, that despite tonight’s show, it’s billed as a celebration 20 years since Silent. Alarm, not playing album in order.

They arrive just after 8.30pm to greet a sold-out O2 Institute, which is mostly full, perhaps surprisingly, of bright indie kids – many wearing sunglasses inside, either as a cool accessory or as protection against glaucoma – which would still have been safe. in their father’s testicles when Silent Alarm first fell.

Most of the class of 2004/05 – think Franz, Kaiser Chiefs, Maxïmo Park – have aged well and all have a sense of relevance, and Bloc Party are no exception. Their musical blueprint borrowed from the disco indie-punk of The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem, the jagged indie of Wire and the introspective rock of Radiohead. It’s no surprise that many contemporary bands, including fellow emo survivors Paramore, cite them as lasting influences.

What makes Silent Alarm continue to stand out is its unbridled urgency. Like Eating Glass is an explosive angular rocker built around guitarist Russell Lissack – proof that one haircut is all you need – and his taut, taut riffs. Equally, Positive Tension builds from a tense rumble to a raucous crescendo of Okereke’s shrieking vocals and hyperactive drum work, originally perfected by Matt Tong but here beautifully performed by the relentless Louise Bartle.

Like many iconic debuts before and after it, Silent Alarm managed to capture a certain feeling and moment while remaining green. The feeling of youthful weariness, boredom, disappointment and loneliness runs through the album like rock. They were grand statements without resorting to Bono-esque platitudes, ambitious anthems that weren’t polished into arena-gentleness, and the Blair-induced frustrations that engulfed many a disenfranchised youth in the mid-Nineties. And yet all these emotions still resonate in modern Britain – many tonight will feel the anger at modern politics as acutely as when they first heard Stiff Helicopter two decades ago.

Alongside the pulsating She’s Hearing Voices and plangent Plans, there are moments of delicate tenderness that show another side of the London band. Tonight they open with So Here We Are, that opening riff a beacon of nostalgia before reaching a euphoric climax. The blue light shows that they can contain the tension and withdraw their more frantic moments into something gentler. And when the band closes their set with the mesmerizing This Modern Love, those who were around in 2004 all throw themselves at each other as if to say “Yeah, I listened to this in my bedroom when I was 15.” The fact that there are many children in the room tonight shows that this legacy will continue unabated.

Meanwhile, though, the band roars through nearly 30 songs from their back catalog. Okereke is on hand to deliver polite and tongue-in-cheek vignettes, reneging on his no-drinking pact, gleefully asking for champagne and asking the crowd if they’re feeling “sexy” before tearing into new single Flirting Again.

The rest of the set looks in the past, from the melodic post-punk comeback Skeleton have been discovered from the Little Thoughts EP to their latest album, the revival of Alpha Games. With each new Bloc Party often born out of difficult times, it’s continually impressive that Okereke and co return with records that remain a wonderful juxtaposition of literate and earthy, brawny yet tender and adventurous yet familiar. The politicized point of Hunting for Witches and the dissonant noise of Prayer are reminders of the first seeds of their growing ambition, while the dance-inspired zip of Flux and One More Chance are proof that Foals and Alt-J owe Bloc Party has considerable debts.

“I’ve got a train to catch, so we better get going,” laughs Okereke towards the end of the show, his colorful shirt now caked with sweat. An amazing album sung in a set of intelligent, thought-provoking and endlessly danceable anthems? It would be worth having to take a taxi for that.

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Bloc Party are on Facebook and X.

All words by Sam Lambeth. Sam is a journalist and musician. More of his work for Louder Than War is available in his archive. His music can be found on Spotify.

All photos by Paul Reynolds. He can be found on Instagram.