Rip it up and start again

A Weekend in the City features all the spindly, textured guitars that earned the band a deluge of comparisons to Gang of Four and Franz Ferdinand, but it feels warmer, richer and bigger than its predecessor.

“I think ultimately there are certain musical tics that are very much a part of our sound, and they’re still there,” Okereke explains. “But I think there’s more texture and a larger palette [on the new album]. But it’s still very much a Bloc Party record. It’s not really scratchy or minimal. The first one wasn’t, either. The first one was very layered and atmospheric.”

Like any member of an emerging band, Okereke sounds alternately tired and defensive of Bloc Party’s presumed influences and the ways in which they’re hollered, incessantly, by the press—as plenty have since pointed out, in 2005 it was hard to find an article about the band that didn’t also mention Franz Ferdinand. “I don’t think [the comparisons] necessarily hurt us,” Okereke says. “If anything, that sort of labeling really made us conscious of this new record, to do something sonically that was as far from that as possible—from Gang of Four, Franz Ferdinand, New Order. The aim was to make something that didn’t sound like anything from the past. You know, to sound like a rock band in the 21st century, just as inspired by [those bands] as modern pop music.”

After lunch, Okereke, his publicist and I stuff ourselves into the backseat of a cab, scooting up Sixth Avenue to Atlantic Records’ New York offices. Okereke has another interview scheduled, so I meet up with Gordon Moakes. Along with Okereke and the other journalist, we’re escorted into a conference room with two leather couches, a couple of electric guitars and a glass coffee table with a big pair of scissors on it.

Moakes, sipping bottled water, appears equally ambivalent about the premature finale of the band’s U.S. tour. “It was the longest tour we were ever to have played. It was a real challenge for us. We felt like we stood out slightly on the bill, in terms of being a bit more left-of-field. But I think we were making an impact. It was so early, we had hardly gotten going, so we have mixed feelings about [the cancellations]. We did talk about [finding a replacement drummer] because our drum tech is quite familiar with the songs, and it could have worked. But it just wouldn’t have felt right, not having Matt there; it would have felt weird. So we felt that the best thing for him was to relax and recover, not worry about trying to get back to finish the tour.”

Bloc Party signed up celebrated producer/remixer Jacknife Lee to man the knobs for A Weekend in the City, banking on his experience tweaking a startling variety of bands and sounds—from U2 to Run DMC. “It’s funny, because in the beginning of last year, we knew we had to start thinking about [a producer],” Moakes explains. “We knew we wanted to try something new. There were several names that came up, and his was one that registered with me, kind of vaguely, and then I forgot about it. We tried out a number of people. And then we got around to actually having the record written, and we were still trying to decide and somebody said ‘What about Jacknife Lee?’ The Snow Patrol album [he worked on] is a really interestingly produced record. And I had been a huge fan of Compulsion, which was [Lee’s] first punk band. And he’d obviously done some DJ/electronic things, so it worked for this record. He sort of spanned the gap.”

With most tracks already written, demo’d, and tested live, Bloc Party settled into Grouse Lodge Recording Studios in rural Ireland, eschewing the record’s main inspiration—London—for the hushed calm of Rosemount, a small village about an hour outside Dublin. Moakes didn’t miss the buzz: “The flat that I’m about to move out of was super noisy, on a main road in East London. The noise of the street seems to echo up from a back alley into my room; it’s just that loud of a place. Shouting, drunkenness. We get a lot of ambulances and police cars and sirens. It’s hard to tune it out. We started the songs on the road, but we wrote most of the record in the heart of East London. The funny thing is that the recording was done in the countryside. After spending all this time in London, thinking about London and writing about London, we wanted to make it in London. But when we sat down with [Jacknife Lee], he said that he had to have us in isolation for four weeks. ‘I want your absolute concentration, I don’t want you drifting in and out. You need to be there, on hand, at every moment, so we can record at all times.’ So we went out into the country, in Ireland, and it was the complete opposite of what the songs were about. Complete peace and quiet.”

After a full year of nonstop press (and an album directly inspired by urban noise), the idea of Bloc Party heralding some unexpected quietude isn’t particularly shocking. It seems only appropriate that the band hole up in the countryside, block out the buzz and reconnect with its sound. The product, A Weekend in the City, is much like the process —starting in stillness, growing louder and louder until it’s teeming with sonic bustle. It’s a declaration that Bloc Party is back, and ready to let its noise echo through the streets.