I’ve been living with this album, at time of writing, for three weeks. Those three weeks, incidentally, aren’t enough – it’s a comfort then to know that my future is open to their continued influence – but they were necessary. Reflecting on it before now might have been like giving directions around a city before I’d even got there, going by the outline I saw on the horizon.
You’ll be aware that Bloc Party are they who are most likely to “do a Franz” in 2005 (as unhelpful, improbable and meaningless as that proclamation may actually be). But aside from unlikely expectations pegged to sales figures, NME cover counts and future Brit Award hauls from hereon in, the point is that there can be no replacement for a record that is so arrestingly direct, but so complex and so intelligent in its base composition. A record that feels important and makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck whenever you hear its name. A record that discloses more with each encounter. ‘Silent Alarm’ is all those things, maybe more.
The scale of its forthcoming successes, not to mention their accelerating infamy, are reliant on the unsuppressed public appetite for spiky chord changes – that’s a given, everyone accepts that. But it also makes a strong mockery of their contemporaries’ relative simplicities. The fact that Joy Division, The Cure, Gang of Four et al obviously inform this record is in many ways overruled by its vibrant modernity. This is a band that spent their formative years consuming late 90s pop culture, and Blur (see the answer/response vocals in ‘Positive Tension’ and contrast with ‘Blur’ era Damon and Graham) and Radiohead (see much of Russell’s shrieking guitar work) also have a large stake, not to mention the more recent success of Interpol spurring them on.
It’s an unblinking record, on its toes in a cold sweat, tense, dark and immensely claustrophobic. Guitars jab out at and back away from each other like rabid dogs on chained restraints in a gloomy brick yard, the pace is sharp, unrelenting and uneasy. Even ‘So Here We Are’, which floats like snowfall in a silk factory, flies like fiery nunchucks once the restless drums kick in. But there’s a confidence, a knowledge, that ebbs through as the messages in songs like ‘Price Of Gas’, ‘Plans’ and ‘Banquet’ become clear. And Kele’s vocals, so strong because they utilize his own unique, blunt soulful voice, deliver repetitive, intense, attuned lyrics like activist chants giving you a clear focus to rally around.
The omission of last year’s stellar ‘Little Thoughts’ from the tracklisting, clearly their most accessible moment, can be taken as brave perhaps, but also as being indicative of the album’s nature and reason why the mainstream may have to acquire a taste for this one. That’s not to say it’s all difficult, more that tracks take time to reveal themselves beyond the initial taut hammering, and work on more than one level. ‘Pioneers’ is the most likely successor, with its heart-stopping chorus and learn-inside-out lyric sheet, but the shorting landscapes and fragmented thoughts of ‘Compliments’ set a high alternative benchmark for the future.
It still feels like this record probably harbours a few secrets. This is and will continue to be so much more than just shock treatment Franz Ferdinand.