Bloc Party's 2008 album Intimacy including bonus tracks. All music property of Bloc Party and Wichita Recordings. Indie Pop Rock 2005 - Best News Songs (Coldplay-Weezer-Beck-Bloc Party-Oasis-Caesars-Kasabian-Maximo Park-Keane-Snow Patrol).rar. Remix album to Intimacy, the third album by indie rock band Bloc Party. Released on 11 May 2009 in the United Kingdom through Wichita Recordings, the band's primary label, in limited edition CD and triple LP formats to coincide with Bloc Party's worldwide touring schedule.
Just weeks ago, Bloc Party announced that their third album, Intimacy, was unlikely to be released until late 2008 at the earliest. But with three days notice, the album was made available as a £5 download on the band's website on 21 August.
Quite why remains uncertain. Perhaps this is stealth release as deployed by Radiohead, intended to give the fans first bite of the cherry and avoid leaks stealing the thunder of release.
Opener Ares certainly merits some thunder. Sharing its name with the Greek war god, the track is a full-on assault of ferocious drums and distorted vocals. The affected South London patois adopted by frontman Kele Okereke sounds almost like Dizzee Rascal as the singer attacks gang culture and intolerance.
Mercury, the only track to have been unveiled before the LP release, maintains the energy of the opener. However, it doesn't work any better in the context of the album than it did as a single, it still sounds like a pretty turn of phrase repeated ad infinitum in the hope that it will become profound, but instead it becomes meaningless.
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The avalanche of drums, electronica and Kele's yelps continues through the conflicted, taut and violent lovesong Halo. Biko is a far mellower affair, which along with Signs forms a duo of laments for dead friends. The second of these songs is the maudlin highlight of the album, with chimes adding a degree of Kate Bush atmospherics that complement the mournful narrative of the lyrics.
Bloc Party Intimacy Rarely
Elsewhere, the electronic stylings that have been unveiled in singles Flux and Mercury fail to disguise poor lyrics and limited themes, such as the unartful dissection of a failing relationship of Trojan Horse ('you used to take your watch off before we made love'), the literally hackneyed dissection of a failing relationship of One Month Off ('when we started this it was paradise, not Bethnal Green'), or the pretentious attempts at obscure depth of Mercury or Zephyrus.
While Ares and Signs are two of Bloc Party's best songs, rather than build on the promising combination of youthful political zeal, wide-eyed confusion and personal conflict on their at times blistering debut Silent Alarm, like A Weekend in the City, Intimacy feels like the same album recycled. Their attempts to disguise their limited palette – the move to electronica and a propensity to strive for profound lyrical repetition – are a thin, shoddy veneer that easily peels off, rapidly revealing, for example, that Ion Square is actually I Still Remember with slightly different lyrics.
At its best Intimacy is taut and claustrophobic or movingly sentimental, but for the main part it is repetitious and bafflingly poorly realised, especially given that they could have had an extra six months to work on it. Without being bad, Intimacy is shockingly unmemorable. The strange circumstances of the release smack of an attempt to slip the album out under the radar in the hope that no-one will notice.
Album + Remix
Bloc Party Intimacy Remixed
Relationships
Opener Ares certainly merits some thunder. Sharing its name with the Greek war god, the track is a full-on assault of ferocious drums and distorted vocals. The affected South London patois adopted by frontman Kele Okereke sounds almost like Dizzee Rascal as the singer attacks gang culture and intolerance.
Mercury, the only track to have been unveiled before the LP release, maintains the energy of the opener. However, it doesn't work any better in the context of the album than it did as a single, it still sounds like a pretty turn of phrase repeated ad infinitum in the hope that it will become profound, but instead it becomes meaningless.
The Unabomber Manifesto Author: The Unabomber ISBN: Genre: Political Science File Size: 36. 96 MB Format: PDF, ePub, Docs Download: 109 Read: 735 Get This Book. Manifiesto unabomber epub free.
The avalanche of drums, electronica and Kele's yelps continues through the conflicted, taut and violent lovesong Halo. Biko is a far mellower affair, which along with Signs forms a duo of laments for dead friends. The second of these songs is the maudlin highlight of the album, with chimes adding a degree of Kate Bush atmospherics that complement the mournful narrative of the lyrics.
Bloc Party Intimacy Rarely
Elsewhere, the electronic stylings that have been unveiled in singles Flux and Mercury fail to disguise poor lyrics and limited themes, such as the unartful dissection of a failing relationship of Trojan Horse ('you used to take your watch off before we made love'), the literally hackneyed dissection of a failing relationship of One Month Off ('when we started this it was paradise, not Bethnal Green'), or the pretentious attempts at obscure depth of Mercury or Zephyrus.
While Ares and Signs are two of Bloc Party's best songs, rather than build on the promising combination of youthful political zeal, wide-eyed confusion and personal conflict on their at times blistering debut Silent Alarm, like A Weekend in the City, Intimacy feels like the same album recycled. Their attempts to disguise their limited palette – the move to electronica and a propensity to strive for profound lyrical repetition – are a thin, shoddy veneer that easily peels off, rapidly revealing, for example, that Ion Square is actually I Still Remember with slightly different lyrics.
At its best Intimacy is taut and claustrophobic or movingly sentimental, but for the main part it is repetitious and bafflingly poorly realised, especially given that they could have had an extra six months to work on it. Without being bad, Intimacy is shockingly unmemorable. The strange circumstances of the release smack of an attempt to slip the album out under the radar in the hope that no-one will notice.
Album + Remix
Bloc Party Intimacy Remixed
Relationships
| remix of: | Intimacy |
|---|---|
| associated singles/EPs: | Signs |
| Wikipedia: | en: Intimacy Remixed[info] |
|---|---|
| Discogs: | https://www.discogs.com/master/152061[info] |
| reviews: | https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/3qmq[info] |
| Wikidata: | Q6057600[info] |
CritiqueBrainz Reviews
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Intimacy Remixed, a collection of songs which initially appeared on Bloc Party's patchy third album, is unprecedented in its field.
Tough as it may be for the purists to comprehend, this record is better than the original.
Villians remix of Ares is a great start to proceedings. The sub-Chemical Bothers clatter of the initial recording being overhauled like an even more robust Justice.
Meanwhile, go-to ghetto bass remixer, Herve, contributes a dark and twitchy 4/4 battering of big single Mercury and We Have Band rip the punky guitars from Halo and prefer to up the pulsing bass and add computer game synth noises.
Although some artists themselves can be precious when their work is tampered with, most progressive musicians realise reworking material can be a useful and occasionally necessary way of making songs better or just relevant to a new audience.
This is surely why Bloc Party have allowed the likes of drum 'n' bass hero John B and venerated US house veteran Armand Van Helden free rein here.
John B cuts his trance 'n' bass moves sweetly over Trojan Horse, which merely bores in its original incarnation, but here soars before, during and after a lengthy euphoric breakdown.
Armand, who many would argue made the first ever essential remix with his take on CJ Bolland's Sugar Is Sweeter, is content to toughen up Signs into something much more dynamic than the original. It won't escape any listeners that AVH's version is a damn sight better to dance to.
Everything else on Intimacy Remixed is worth checking out, particularly Banjo Or Freakout's Ion Square, which is less a remix than a beautiful, Spacemen 3-style hymnal cover version. It's another reason why London-based Italian Alessio Andalusia (aka BoF) is one of 2009's best ones to watch.
Since the rock and dance boundaries truly began to disintegrate in the 1990s remixing has been a permanent fixture of modern music and has here reached the zenith of its validity. Bloc Party and others interested in the now and next of songwriting are advised to listen carefully.
