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Bloc Party – Anatomy of a Brief Romance

Bloc Party’s atrocious seventh album is an immature embarrassment with very few redeeming qualities.

In 2005, Bloc Party released Silent Alarm, a spiky, thrilling debut, brimming with urgency. It’s not a perfect record by any stretch, but it has aged more gracefully than the work of rival post-punk revival artists like Franz Ferdinand. Tracks like “Helicopter,” “Banquet,” and “Like Eating Glass” set a high standard, and while the quality dipped throughout the second half, Silent Alarm seemed like the beginning of something special. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way.

Over the following two decades, Bloc Party failed to recapture the magic of their bombastic opening salvo, releasing five unremarkable records to diminishing interest and expectation. They became a legacy band with a surprisingly sparse legacy, living off the scraps of their heyday with a patched-together line-up.

Our last full review of Bloc Party was back in 2012, when Gabbie called Four “boring, forgettable, and embarrassing,” while noting a “pervasive, cloying stink of trying to prove something.” She gave Four a three, but the profoundly tedious Anatomy of a Brief Romance is inferior in every sense, and the problem is Kele Okereke’s juvenile, diaristic lyrics, and the cringeworthy manner in which he delivers them. Jarvis Cocker can effortlessly drop in a sarcastically spoken zinger, but Okereke is no Jarvis, and his vocal stylings on tracks like the godawful “Stories” (“you say go your own way, but you still keep watching…my stories”) reek of amateur musical theatre.

The pathetic “Muscleworks” drips with the kind of jealousy (“Who is he? There’s a boy that’s watching us”) that probably doomed the titular romance to failure, but more striking is the childlike naivety of Okereke’s language. Later, on “Eulogy,” Okereke—a 44-year-old man—considers himself “one of those boys.” This world of boys watching boys, of complaining about going to “someone else’s party on my birthday,” feels shockingly adolescent. Meanwhile, lines like “every day is such a vibe, every day that we’re alive” would raise eyebrows in a primary school English class.

Okereke’s dominant presence on Anatomy of a Brief Romance leaves insufficient space for his band’s taut musicianship to redeem proceedings. Bloc Party can still play, as the stuttering “Not Your Problem” demonstrates, but the next preposterous lyric is never too far away. I chuckled with incredulity on several occasions.

I am not disputing Okereke’s heartbreak—I’m sure this break-up hit him hard, and I truly sympathise—but I am criticising his ability to transform his feelings into compelling songs. People break up every day, and most of them don’t create worthwhile art from their pain. Kele Okereke is one of them. Anatomy of a Brief Romance’s failings don’t make Okereke’s feelings any less valid, just as much as those feelings don’t afford him a pass for thinking there might be an audience for this turgid embarrassment of a record.

Anatomy of a Brief Romance is out now via cOnTAGIOUS LTD.