This slightly vague introduction owes to the fact, that both camps have released new albums recently, the latter however in form of lead singer Kele's solo effort. back to that later.
I am not a tremendous fan of Arcade Fire. Or, perhaps more well put, I'm no big listener. I do admire their talent, and both their two first albums are genuine masterpieces - it's just sort of on a periphery to me. I've been through their latest album, The Suburbs, quite a few times now, and let's be frank: There are some extraordinary songs on it. Take the fast-paced, no-bullshit 'Month of May', the enigmatic 'Ready To Start', the beautifully moving 'We Used To Wait' and of course the album's definite highlight, 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)'. The lyrical theme of growing up in suburbia is really interesting too, though it seems to slide a bit in some of the songs, but mostly it's very present, especially on some of the above mentioned tracks. I think what ultimately keeps this album from really igniting me is its length. A full 60 minutes is really too much, unless you compose really slow-moving music (The Knife's Tomorrow, In A Year, for example, isn't too hampered by its length of an hour and a half). You kinda lose focus midway through, and although the album does pick up towards the end, there are moments of boredom scattered throughout. All in all, it is a pretty majestic record.
Kele, on the other hand, has really truly placed himself in between two chairs. I absolutely didn't expect much of his solo debut, being as I have never seen him as the interesting and creative force in Bloc Party - I do think both drummer Matt Tong and guitarist Russell Lissack deserve much more of the honor in creating what made Bloc Party so vivid. But Kele misses the target in an other way than I had thought. I was expecting an absolute departure from indie, and a creative (and perhaps brilliant) mess of electronic influences from incomparably vibrant London underground, that lives everywhere around Kele, but, it seems, not truly in him. Some wonky, some dubstep, some UK funky, some dance-punk - some of the same vigorous energy that seemed to seep through every tiny crack of Bloc Party's third album, Intimacy, on tracks like 'Ares', 'Mercury' and 'Zephyrus'. Alright, there is a tee-wee bit of dubstep-influences scattered here and there, but overall, The Boxer, as the album is titled, is a schizophrenic mess. It seems as though Kele hasn't quite taken the leap from being an indie rocker - some of the tracks, such as 'Everything You Wanted' and 'Unholy Thoughts' just sound too much like leftover Bloc Party. That is perhaps a strange thing to criticize from the viewpoint of a huge Bloc Party devotee like myself, but the knish is, it just doesn't work without Tong and Lissack's magic instrumentalisation. Same goes for Kele's lyrics (and voice, for that matter), that have been often criticized by Bloc Party haters. I find they fit very well into Bloc Party's musical universe, but not at all on an album that, at least partly, tries to be aggressive and underground-like. Kele needs to either take the leap full-fledgedly, or return to the gang.
