Album Review: Silent Alarm by Bloc Party

Much more polished, serious, and straight-ahead than their initial EPs suggested, Bloc Party's debut album, Silent Alarm, reveals them as a band equally informed by taut art-punk and the grand gestures and earnestness of groups like Coldplay and U2. Though they're not quite as stadium-sized expansive as either of those two bands (yet), Bloc Party sound a lot more comfortable making proclamations like "Positive Tension"'s "Something glorious is about to happen/A reckoning!" than contemporaries like Franz Ferdinand or the Futureheads would be. Silent Alarm is also more varied than Bloc Party's early work indicated it might be, spanning edgy pop, atmospheric ballads, and angular, percussive tracks that are all served well by the album's big, layered production.

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Anticipation hangs heavy over Bloc Party, acclaimed as - and possibly doomed to be - "this year's Franz Ferdinand". The exhilaratingly propulsive opener Like Eating Glass and the lambent So Here We Are explain the excitement, but a replication of their forebears' commercial blitzkrieg might be beyond the London quartet, at least for now. There's none of Franz Ferdinand's sexiness, funk or swagger here, nor an undeniable hit along the lines of Take Me Out.

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