BLOC PARTY
Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By David Weiss
If feeling ecstatically unsettled is your idea of a good time, then an evening with Bloc Party should be in order. The UK four-piece's debut full-length, Silent Alarm (Vice, 2005), has proven a positively jarring listen with high-strung guitars, fast-loping bass lines and frantic drums led on by punky vocals and an intelligent attitude.
As arresting as its new studio record is — with 15 tracks highlighted by songs whose titles, such as “Like Eating Glass” and “Positive Tension,” say it all — Bloc Party is a band that starts and ends with its live show. The group — which comprises singer/guitarist Kele Okereke, guitarist Russell Lissack, bassist Gordon Moakes and drummer Matt Tong — is unanimous that its breakout moment was a gig in a freezing old North London factory called Electrowerkz. It was an opening slot for Franz Ferdinand, and with the group's unrelenting stage manners playing out to a wider audience, Bloc Party got enough new recruits to move its career to the next level.
“It's not really about the playing or anything like that, really,” Okereke says of the band's live philosophy, five minutes after waking up in Salt Lake City. “In a good show, you just know there's something special in the air, just a little magic. It's about the way the crowd responds to what you're doing. You can really tell if it's a good show because there's something in the air that wasn't there before you started. If it sounds abstract — it is!
“There's been shows that we've done where it feels average because the crowd wasn't getting into it. If they are, we just play better. Conversely, a bad show feels like there isn't much communication between the audience and the band. A performance is a two-way thing, like a mirror: You project what people put onto you.”
With Silent Alarm sporting a huge array of sonic doodads, from glockenspiel to cowbell to triangle to mandolin to double drum sets, exact replicas of the songs onstage are out of the question. “There's ring modulators and lots of different sources that we can't re-create live,” Okereke confirms. “So we have a minimalist, stripped-down version that's kind of raw; if we got caught up too much in trying to re-create the album, it might not come across well, so we do a nice interpretation of the stuff. We don't play keyboards, however — I wouldn't want to introduce a keyboard until we've exhausted the capabilities of guitar.
“I play an American Telecaster with a Fender Hot Rod 1×12 combo amp,” Okereke continues. “I've got a very strange collection of vintage synth pedals and a Boss feedback distortion pedal that's being discontinued — I'm very pleased I've got it! It does harmonic overtones, and I've messed around with it so it can do exactly what I want. Our bass player also uses a lot of extra pedals; we both have quite a big setup. Still, there's nothing worse than a guitarist with really synthetic effects. At the end of the day, I want my guitar to sound like a guitar.”
Okereke finds his attitude toward monitoring steadily evolving. “The monitor mix is very important so the band and audience can feed off each other,” he says. “It gives us space to improvise. We don't use in-ear monitors, just wedges, but I've been experimenting with having earplugs in when I sing: It helps me to hear my voice, and it cuts out the high range.”
As the focal point of a band that understands what a great gig can do for your reputation, Okereke knows what he wants to get out of seeing another group's show and what he loves to hear after one of his own. “When I watch other bands, I like to think this moment is an urgent one,” he says. “I remember a show we did in London, and someone said to me, ‘It felt like we were watching an important band.’ I think that's amazing.”
PEDAL PARTY
Boss DD-3 Digital Delay, DD-5 Digital Delay,
DF-2 Super Feedbacker & Distortion,
OS-2 OverDrive/Distortion, OC-3 Super Octave,
PS-5 Super Shifter, PW-10 V-Wah, SYB-3 Bass
Synthesizer effects units
EBow hand-held electronic bow
Ernie Ball VP Jr. 6180 Passive Volume effects unit
Fender Precision Bass (2), Telecaster (4) guitars
Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler, FM4 Filter Modeler
Pearl drum kit
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