Four

Four reminds me a bit of Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action by Franz Ferdinand – some of my favorites and least favorites from the band are packaged together, though in this case the strongest songs on Four aren’t enough to lift it up anywhere near favorite status for me.

Listening to the album and reading the lyrics, I got the instinct that Four was the way it was because something or someone pissed the Bloc Party members off while making it, and the band’s presence in press rumors at the time as well as the members seemingly conflicting with Kele Okereke’s apparent workaholic attitude may have contributed to this. However it ended up this way, Four feels like two albums stirred together: the kind of album a band makes when they’ve settled into their strengths and are ready to make some career highlights, and the kind of album a band makes when the members have been through enough BS and want to rage against a label for doing them dirty. I like albums of both kinds, but as a single experience, these two styles mix like oil and water.

Bloc Party leaned towards intensity with many of the great songs on A Weekend In The City (Uniform, Song For Clay, Where is Home) or some later singles that also pulled the heavier style off well (Traps), but where those are very unique sounding and (in the case of AWITC) intricately made, some of the songs from Four, like We Are Not Good People and Coliseum, feel like they skipped the work of detailing and complexity that made those other songs work. Some have unique and effective aspects, like 3 X 3 and its epic wailing chorus, but they’re not enough to make me want to revisit them.

I love it when loud and rowdy 2000’s indie rockers try their hand at sentimental songs, and Bloc Party’s heartfelt songs are among the best in the genre and a more essential piece of their albums. The songs of this kind on Four are the best part of the album, but they also occasionally suffer from poor execution, Truth being a great example of the strengths and flaws of this album. The fact that Truth managed to become one of my favorite Bloc Party songs is impressive considering the main guitar line feels like it’s shyly kicking my eardrums (As someone who knows nothing about music production, I’m going to make a guess and say the mixing on this album is very bad and hope I’m right). However, the melody and idea of a repressed love being able to bloom are just so strong that I have to love the song anyways, and the bridge is one of my favorite moments in any Bloc Party song (Kele’s vocals across the album are excellent as always).

VALIS is a beautiful song, capturing what I love about Bloc Party’s sound and matching sentimentality with hooks. Real Talk is very smooth and enjoyable, and feels well executed. Day Four and The Healing are also good, but they feel spare and a little boring, lacking either the emotional effectiveness of songs like those on Intimacy or the bit of muscle and drive in songs like This Modern Love. Day Four isn’t helped by the melody sounding a lot like Two More Years and Rhododendrons, making this song feel even less engaging by comparison.

I do think, however, that these songs are brought down by their surroundings. There’s no consistent tone in this album for me to settle into in a way that sticks out so much I assume it’s intentional, but it just makes the listening experience worse. Truth feels like it comes out of nowhere following Team A, VALIS feels like it comes out of nowhere following Coliseum (especially the ending of that song… I love studio chatter but I did NOT need to know that), and The Healing has no time to sink in before We Are Not Good People yells at me to throw out that optimism. This problem reminds me of Intimacy where it felt like a complete story was being told out of order, an interesting idea that would probably have been better off done the normal way.

I tend to slightly dislike albums that aren’t meant to be listened to from start to end, instead having you listen on shuffle or pick songs out for your playlists. I don’t think Four was meant to be one of those albums, but I feel like I’m doing the songs on Four a bit of a favor when I take them out of the album experience. I can see this album working for others, and there’s nothing here I’d call bad, but it just does not work as an album to me.