Best music website in the world™, Drowned In Sound, turns 6 this year, and to celebrate it has named its favourite 66 albums of the last 6 years. Bloc Party's 'Silent Alarm' is at number 3 in the list, behind At The Drive-In's 'Relationship of Command' and Björk's 'Vespertine'.
Here's what DiS has to say about SA:
"It begins with every instrument given a few seconds of sole recognition, with every member of the collective force teasing you and opening door after door ‘til some snake-like tunnel of blinding lights comes alive with the final instrument: the echoey flames of Kele’s voice playing with the various shades of the human condition and the half-thoughts of a generation. From then on in it is all surreal snapshots of crosses on eyes, manifesto slogans, cut ’n’ pasted sound bites from newspapers and the detritus of modern society blending into one resilient mêlée of contradictions of hope and fear.
'Silent Alarm' is notably both the highest placed debut and British album in Our 66. Its success was no accident. It’s an album full of anthems that remind you of falling out of clubs covered in body sweat - some of which is your own. There are those guitars on ‘Positive Tension’ which claw the plastering from historical monuments as-heard-on-The OC, before the strings bend until they're as celestial as mercury. Aside from the radio-friendly dancefloor bass 'n' drums, this album has such added depth in the slower moments with graceful sweeping snowstorm soundscapes as-heard-on-Shipwrecked (‘So Here We Are’). It’s within the quieter moments where the all-over goose bumps raise themselves every single time you return to this album.
Not only is this album the finest debut album of the past six years, it’s also one of the most poignant, with as much glitter as war dust in the corners of its eyes. We can't go any further in talking about this without mentioning Paul Epworth's forward-leaning production: you don't need a degree in sound engineering to feel the textures and emotions this album conjures and pours upon its audience impeccably before begging for repeated inspection. The production suss adds a futuristic feeling to the album and raises the songwriting and the band’s inventiveness to another level. Their success is not measured only in terms of sales but also in the waves of inspiration which this album sent through the intelligentsia, from art scenes to fashion worlds and beyond. This album not only made people post blogs, send ridiculous demanding mail-outs and pick up pens to write amazing things about it but has, we’d imagine, played an integral part in last year being the biggest year for guitar sales ever. And it probably encouraged some haircuts, too.
Where this record truly began was a small band posting on our messageboard, the poster looking for band members; the new four-piece, then called Union, subsequently played at a few DiS nights. The rest is history. Not that this is about bigging ourselves up, and the band’s roots don’t serve to lend bias to this decision at all: this is an amazing debut album which can claim a level of restraint and clarity and still contains a brave vision beyond almost everything else in the list. For every style-over-substance record which the world’s self-imposed bastions of taste may claim is better, and for every indie elitist snob who’d prefer the songs were full of bird noises which never really started who'll somehow claim this is too derivative and for every music fan, there's a melody, a poignant line, a historical monument of a riff, a sweat-dripped drum solo, a head-thrusting bass-line and a graceful ice-cap of a soundscape. There’s even a moment either on TV, at a festival or that thing called Real Life that this record binds itself to like a pearl to its oyster.
If you don’t own and cherish this record already, you know what to do. DiS Bless Bloc Party."
Update:
Ever the gentleman, Kele emailed DiS from Japan to say thank you:
"Thank you very much DiS. It's slightly odd receiving plaudits now for 'Silent Alarm', as mentally I am completely over what that record meant to me. It is still flattering though, and I am pleased that it seemed to mean something to you guys as well.
We have just finished our new record and I have been thinking about it obsessively for the last two years. I can not tell you how great it feels to be out of my head on a disc that i can listen to. Silent Alarm was a starting point for Bloc Party, but there is far more that we can do as a band, which I guess you are about to find out."
Labels: Press, Silent_Alarm
¶ 2:56 PM
