I was browsing in Polyester the other night, basically in my own zone and not paying much attention to things around me, when my ear was caught by a fraught voice singing what sounded like "I'll charm them all", over and over, over a kind of orchestral indie-rock textural thing - I wondered if maybe it was some Arcade Fire that I hadn't heard before. I now know that the song is called "On", that he's in fact singing "I can charm them all" but in a much more interestingly self-doubting and needy fashion that the bald words would suggest, and that it's off the new album by Bloc Party.
I remember being surprised when Silent Alarm turned out to be good, and here's a turnup for the books - A Weekend in the City, while seeing the band doing that second album 'stretching out and becoming more expansive' thing, is of a similar quality. "On" turns out to be a good primer for where they're at right now, and it's one of the best songs on the album, which itself is, while far from life-changing, quite consistently strong. Good work, Bloc Party!
