Lately I've been wondering if I'm not in the process of experiencing a genuine shift in musical dominant away from indie and alt-rock - whether the Arcade Fire mightn't have been something of the last hurrah as far as that field went for me. If there is such a shift going on, though, I don't know where albums like Silent Alarm will fit in.
I mean, it's really rather good.
I don't mind derivativeness unless it becomes distracting or makes a record boring to listen to, neither of which is the case here. Nor could I care less whether a band or musician is part of a movement or if they've been hyped half to death by NME & co - I don't have any difficulties in dealing with the idea that musical merit isn't the main driver behind whether or not I ever hear of an artist, or how many people like them or buy their records. So, all in all, I've been pretty happy with the current so-called post-punk/new wave revival - even if I've been paying attention only incidentally - and consider it a good result that it's thrown up at least one (though probably only one) band with something of an air of greatness about them in Interpol, as well as a whole lot of fun party anthems (every second Strokes song, "Take Me Out", "House of Jealous Lovers", "Mr Brightside", "Bandages", and plenty of others as heard on the radio).
So I thought that "Banquet" was flippin' excellent - jittery-catchy, groovy-rhythmic, slightly unhinged-exciting, and ends before you want it to, so that you have to listen to it again straight away. But I didn't get enthused about Bloc Party despite all the gushing press writeups of the album and the band (not always the same thing), mainly, I guessed, because of aforementioned shift in my own horizons. Now I come to listen to the album, and find that (a) a lot of it is very banquetesque and (b) it's very good.
Hard to pick highlights, but a few (apart from "Banquet" itself) might be opening double-punch "Like Eating Glass" and "Helicopter", "She's Hearing Voices" (best Joy Division title that never was), and the positively pretty "So Here We Are". When the band get it right, this record flips a lot of the right switches in my head in a way that not many out and out rock bands do these days - PGMG, Interpol, maybe Spoon and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and that's about it - but still I'm not as excited about the album as much as I feel I should be. Whether this is to do with my current musical positioning, or the album itself, is, I suppose, a moot point. Still, if anyone casually backlashes against Bloc Party or Silent Alarm while I'm around, at least without a very cogent defence indeed, just watch my dust as I scathe the backlasher with a suitable amount of derision.
